The test results you have selected are very old and may not represent the current state of Wine.

Selected Test Results

What works

Everything. Full Screen mode on FFXI and Input support for Direct Input gamepads. Full Screen mode must be at the exact same resolution of your screen to work correctly and not break X entirely. FFXI brightens the screen when on full screen mode and X must be restarted after a play session to return the screen to its native brightness. But the game will play fine in full screen mode.

What does not

Full Screen on POL due to the issues with resolution stated above, as PoL can not be increased beyond its default resolution.

Workarounds

What was not tested

Nothing.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

GPU:

Driver:

Additional Comments

Set to Windows 7 Mode to get past title screen on FFXI, Set resolution accordingly if using full screen mode, or set to Windowed mode before launching the game.

It is recommended to be using the official files from the PlayOnline Site. You may need to use your 7zip archiver to decompress the .001, .002, and .003 files.

The installer has 7z built-in, but it wont find the archives if 'FFXISETUP.exe' runs from a working directory other than where the archives lie, and will exit (in other words, one must 'cd' to the directory where 'FINALFANTASYXI.Data.00{1,2,3}' are).

Installation works on both, 64-bit and 32-bit prefixes, although on 64-bit, it sometimes freezes (seen as 'err:seh:setup_exception stack overflow in the terminal'). The installation will continue, if the 'ISBEW64.exe' is terminated before it goes full-zombie, and the installation aborts.

It's a good idea to manually uncompress the files (open 'FINALFANTASYXI.Data.001' with your favorite tool that supports 7-zip archives), or copy the 'extracted' directory elsewhere, or rename it. The 'FFXISETUP.exe' feels a bit slow for the job, and it's possible to make it go quite nuts should the directory already contain the uncompressed files. It will also delete all the uncompressed files upon failure/success.

In particular, the installer sometimes stops moving on to the next expansion without a clear reason (did not investigate). Restarting the process will make it continue on.

When manually uncompressed, the game and expansions can be installed by running the 'setup.exe' under the 'PlayOnline' and 'INST1', 'INST2', etc. directories as needed.

Gameplay

Windows 7 needs to be set as the reported Windows version, or the game client will crash after accepting the licence agreement.

Everything imaginable in-game works, though the game can be quite heavy, depending on settings (especially due to the shadows). Using CSMT from Staging helps with FPS by allowing more CPU to be used.

Gamepad

A PS2-controller via a simple USB-converter works flawlessly (aside from sometimes when entering the game, and the analog mode is off, the player character and the camera will start moving by themselves, but they stop when the analog mode is enabled (whether or not this would happen on Windows as well is unknown at this time)).

Japanese Input

Requires the Japanese PlayOnline Viewer software, as is intended (using 'uim' to switch input methods).

Works while in PlayOnline Viewer, but not while in-game. This may be due to how things are built-in. It is possible to paste text from outside the PlayOnline Viewer into it, but the same is not true for the actual game client.

The opening movie does not display, but the audio plays (for about 10 seconds, then it's skipped). This is likely a gstreamer issue, or missing codecs (the video was visible at least two years ago, though upside down, and mirrored). Possible clue: 'err:msvideo:ICLocate Required media codec 'vidc I420' not found!'

Sometimes, usually only after having gone back to the PlayOnline Viewer from the game, the application will crash when re-launching the game from the viewer (backtraces speak of the (proprietary) nvidia-drivers).

Using the Japanese client, typing Japanese in-game doesn't work via 'uim', probably because the thing is heavily built-in (text can't be 'pasted in' even).

Using the Japanese client, having the opening movie enabled will crash the client when launched from the PlayOnline Viewer.

Installation Instructions pre 12-19-2016

HOWTO - Final Fantasy XI: The Ultimate Collection 2011

This HOWTO will help you get Final Fantasy XI setup on your machine using "The Ultimate Collection 2011" retail package, or equivalent media. Here you will also find a guide to get the PlayOnline Viewer running. This HOWTO is complete to the best knowledge of its creators, however, there may be some errors that have not been resolved.

Please
note that in order to run this game, you will most likely NEED the
proprietary drivers for your graphics card(s). Open-source drivers are
known to have problems with 3D rendering, and may render many things
incorrectly or slowly. Please bear this in mind when submitting test
results, as well.

Installation

Insert "The Ultimate Collection 2011" dvd into your dvd drive.

In a terminal session, type in "wine /path/to/dvdrom/PlayOnline/setup.exe".

From here, you will be guided by a setup wizard. Choosing all defaults is acceptable.

After the PlayOnline Viewer is finished installing, click finish on the wizard if you haven't done so already.

Type in "cd/path/to/dvdrom/INST1" to go into the install directory for Final Fantasy XI.

Type in "wine setup.exe".

A wizard will appear that will guide you through setting up Final Fantasy XI. Again, choosing all defaults is acceptable.

After
installation is complete for Final Fantasy XI, you may be given a
choice to restart your machine. Choose "No, I will restart my machine
later" and click finish.

From here, type in "cd/path/to/dvdrom/INST2".

Type in "wine setup.exe".

Follow the wizard for setting up Rise of the Zilart, choosing all defaults, and selecting to restart your computer later, if prompted.

Type in "cd/path/to/dvdrom/INST3".

Type in "wine setup.exe".

Follow the wizard for setting up Chains of Promathia, choosing all defaults, and selecting to restart your computer later, if prompted.

Type in "cd/path/to/dvdrom/INST4".

Type in "wine setup.exe".

Follow the wizard for setting up Treasures of AhtUrhgan, choosing all defaults, and selecting to restart your computer later if prompted.

Type in "cd/path/to/dvdrom/INST5".

Type in "wine setup.exe".

Follow
the wizard for setting up Wings of the Goddess, choosing all defaults,
and selecting to restart your computer later if prompted.

You may now umount your installation media. Be sure to store it in a safe place.

Overriding DXDIAGN.DLL

Obtain a copy of the file "Dxdiagn.dll" from a Windows XP install (It'll be in the System32 Directory)

Copy said file into your WINE installation (.wine), place it either in the Windows folder or the System32 folder, either is fine.

Open a terminal and navigate to the directory you placed Dxdiagn.dll into.

Here the PlayOnline Viewer will be updated. Follow the instructions to update the viewer.

After PlayOnline Viewer is updated, the viewer will ask you to click next to restart it. Do so, and PlayOnline Viewer Should restart.

Once
logged in, you may run Final Fantasy XI. It will be updated upon
running them for the first time, this is the perfect opportunity to eat
some cheesecake, because the initial update could take hours. Do note that if you have registered the registration codes for any of the Abyssea expansions it will be automatically downloaded and installed in the update.

Once the update has completed, Final Fantasy XI should launch with your desired settings.

Go to a heavily populated area, and type "/yell Final Fantasy XI Runs In Linux!!" into Final Fantasy, and press Enter

This will create a new instance directory for wine in your home folder. It will be named .wine-second

You will get a few errors. You can dismiss all of them.

Use your favourite file handling utility and copy the complete PlayOnline
folder from your previous (/home/yourname/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/)
wine instance to your new instance. (Yes you will need two installs of FFXI for this to work)

Make
sure you copy your original install from it's root folder in the
Program Files directory to the Program Files directory of your new wine
instance. The folder named PlayOnline is all you need to copy.

Now you should have one original install in:

/home/yourname/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/PlayOnline/
and one copy of that install in:
/home/yourname/.wine-second/drive_c/Program Files/PlayOnline/

In a shell do:

regedit

Now make sure that the root of the registry is
selected in the tree structure on the left hand side. In English the
root is called 'My Computer'

Now click the following sequence in the Regedit menu bar:
'Registry -> Export registry file'

Select a location to save your registry export. (Suggest saving to desktop for easy removal after you are done)

Close the registry editor.

In a shell do:

WINEPREFIX="/home/$USER/.wine-second" regedit

You are now editing the registry information for your new instance of wine.

Once again; select the root of the registry (My Computer). Then click the following sequence in the registry editor:
'Registry -> Import registry file'

Select the file you saved in the previous regedit instance. (The one I suggested you save to your desktop)

Once
the file has been imported... (might take a while depending on size of
registry) you are ready to start using two instances of FFXI at the same time on the same computer.

The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. WineHQ is not responsible for what they say.

Re-assessment by Pandoraxero on Saturday December 3rd 2016, 9:17

Just so everyone knows, I am one of the people who pushed for the imm32 sanity check patch (which saw this game go from Garbage to Gold) 8 years ago. I see this as a good time to re-assess the situation, and now I'm running Debian, with the intent of getting a clearer picture of the present state of this project on a base binary distro (which has forked more than any other distro, and most notably is the parent distro of the *buntu distros, and mint, among others)

After completing my assessment of the status on Debian, I intend to touch other base or near-base distros. My agenda currently includes Fedora (near-base), Slackware (base), FreeBSD (base, non-linux), and finally, I will be re-assessing the situation with Gentoo (base, though I suspect Chiitoo may also be working this part of the operation right now).

At each step, I'll be providing test results, and writing a How-to. The test results will be published, but the How-to will not be finalized, let alone published until I find an appropriate version of wine upon which to base it, and wade through the intricacies of each distro.

This will be a slow process, and could easily take 3 months, or possibly longer (I suspect FreeBSD and Slackware will be the hardest for me to work with, considering my lack of experience with them). I will be finishing up with Gentoo, since it's what I've been using for a decade. Essentially, these different distros will be taking me out of my element, for the sole purpose of achieving a fresh perspective on the status of this particular game on wine as a whole, rather than its status on just one distro.

If I'm not covering your distro of choice, well... I'm sorry, but I don't have time to touch on every single *buntu, *BSD, and all the numerous forks of Debian, Red Hat, and Slack. I'd be working this piece for another 8 years if I did that. My goal is to evaluate distros which have demonstrated, and continue to demonstrate, longevity. This essentially means base and near-base only.

Well, so far, fedora's giving me nothing but a truckload of derp on install, complaining about missing mono and stuff. I got what I believe to be an effective-enough workaround. I've been tried and tested, but I won't accept defeat. (Bonus points if you can name where that line's from, without googling it.)

I had to do a winetricks dotnet20 in a 32 but prefix to get it installed on kubuntu 16.10
I'll be reactivating my account to test fully, but pol updated fine.
Sorry I can't place your reference. However, for when the day is long, forever carry on.

I only needed to set the reported Windows version to 7, when using the installer from the PlayOnine site (to get into the title screen, after the licence agreement). This is the only thing keeping it from being Platinum, but that should soon change, with the default becoming Windows 7 some time after 2.0 release. \ö/

Well, I've stumbled upon the beast that is the reason I hold such disdain for binary distros... I'm co-posting this to the forums, but I figured I'd mention it here, too. This is on Fedora25. I think Fedora might have forgotten a dep or two...

I have recently come to the conclusion that this game is, in fact, easier to install and run in wine... than it is on Windows 10. There's been enough people complaining about Windows 10, and this most certainly confirms that there is good reason behind the near-unilateral hatred Windows 10 has been getting... and continues to get. Wine has been getting consistently better over time, but catching up to windows has been a cat-and-mouse game for over a decade. As resentment towards the newsances (see what I did there?) of higher and higher Windows Versions grows, I think people will eventually start looking for a new OS... but then I said the same thing a decade ago when Vista had its RTM, and the net change so far has been negligible, although the non-GNU, yet Linux-based, Android OS is showing a substantial market success.

Is anyone aware of a way to get Japanese input working? My locale, keyboard, and FFXI client are in Japanese, and I can read what others write, but cannot type back in Japanese. When I write in Japanese the usual prompt appears below the FFXI window, but the characters themselves never appear in the FFXI chat log. I'm on wine 1.8.4 and have also tried this with the English client.

As far as I'm aware, it should be possible only in the Japanese client (without modifying the client).

That said, I've never even tried to input Japanese into an application running via Wine, only native Linux applications (via uim), and as such, I don't have any immediate ideas on what the issue could be.

Are you able to input Japanese into other applications running via Wine?

The last time I tried it, which, as you probably guessed, was 8 years ago, it DID NOT work. The game would run, but switching to Japanese input did not work, presumably because the IMM/IME was not 100% compatible with what the JP version was expecting. That may have changed, though. It was a real bummer for me back then, as, in addition to college classes, I was using FFXI as a platform to get a better grasp on the Japanese Language. The download from the JP site is, of course 100% legal... though 8 years ago, it did not exist, so I had to pirate the Japanese version, if getting a disc for an MMO that requires a user account and monthly payments can be described as "piracy"...

Operating off my knowledge from Windows: notably, Final Fantasy XI itself fully supports Japanese input, regardless of region, it's just disabled by detecting what PlayOnline version is being used (which explains how windower made it work on US and EU versions. Its IME plugin alters that part of the detection, but leaves it so that the ingame text is still in... whatever native language. I think the only options were EN, DE, and FR). So you don't need to reinstall everything, just PlayOnline. You can use registry hax to migrate your US, EU, or JP settings, verbatim, to any other region, that way you're not wasting drivespace (Which, 8 years ago, was NOT CHEAP)

I finally put some time into trying this out, and while it took a while for me to figure out, it seems to work at least in the PlayOnline Viewer.

In short, have 'app-i18n/uim' (Gentoo package naming) and its dependencies installed, have 'uim-xim' running, and start the application with XMODIFIERS="@im=uim" set (either on the command-line, or exported for the shell).

I can then switch the input method via the global hotkeys set via uim settings.

The IME controls on the lower right part of the screen don't seem to be usable for me though. It did curiously say 'ON' before I got it working. Now when I have it working, it says 'OFF'. :]

The fact that it does work in Wine notepad there, but not in-game is curious as well. Regardless, I hope this will be of help. If you can confirm that it does work for you in PlayOnline Viewer as well, but not in-game, let me know and I'll test that out as well (may test it anyways at some point, as it shouldn't be too big of a deal to update the client with my already up-to-date files).

Does not work in-game, at least not yet. Now that I think about it, it does make sense, because the Japanese Input Method is more or less built-in to the game client, as far as I understand it, and it's not even possible to paste text into it. This may explain why 'uim' works for PlayOnline Viewer, since it's possible to paste text into that.

I feel it may require considerable work to have it working in-game, via Wine, but I will hope I'm wrong... :]

RE: Japanese input? by Pandoraxero on Thursday December 15th 2016, 8:56

You are correct that it is built in to the game itself. My best guess is that such a method was required for cross-compatibility between PS2, PC, and XB360, but the console versions have been decommissioned, so those are hardly relevant. I think Ganiman and I were trying to get it to work 8 years ago, with some assistance from Aikar (makes sense, as Aikar was partly responsible for the Windower project). A fruitless endeavor, but things may have changed in 8 years.

If it weren't for Aikar, I would have likely never figured out that the JP version of PlayOnline could be used with a NA FFXI install. I'm all but done testing on Fedora. I still have Slack and FreeBSD to go, then I get Gentoo back in its place for testing, then test with Knoppix, then back to Gentoo to see if I can give JP input the old college try.

no numpad available for main menu by NovemberDelta on Friday July 1st 2016, 6:26

playing on a 2011 macbook pro.

installation and game runnin smooth except for not being able to enter the ingame main menu due to lacking [-] key on a numpad. tried several other ways like keyboard remote apps and stuff but couldn't get anything to work.

RE: no numpad available for main menu by NovemberDelta on Friday July 1st 2016, 7:00

that's what i already tried...without any luck. everytime i either hit the dash [-] or dash with ctrl or alt it opens the console and just writes "-". i also tried some workarounds like mouse apps for the mouse-wheel button, since i only have an apple magic mouse available.

any other ideas or should i just get me a low-budget keyboard with numpad and give it a try?

RE: no numpad available for main menu by Chiitoo on Friday July 1st 2016, 8:01

Hm. It seems like it's not seeing the modifier key(s). Are you able to open the macro palettes by pressing and holding any of them down (the second key needs to be pressed before the palette opens, if it opens at all)?

Another key that opens the menu for me (with alt or ctrl modifying it), is the [+] key, which is actually [-] in a GB (and I believe US) QWERTY keyboard-layout. I normally use a Finnish layout, so things are a bit different.

That is, I have [-] next to the right shift-key, to the left from it, while it's [/] in a GB layout. My [+] key is next to the [0] key, to the right, where the [-] key is in a GB layout. They all work the same for me regardless of which layout I have in use.

As far as I know, the bindings are not even stored in the Windows registry unfortunately, so they can't be changed from there either, and as such, I don't think I have any other ideas aside from using a gamepad or a different keyboard. :\

RE: no numpad available for main menu by NovemberDelta on Friday July 1st 2016, 10:08

update: got me a cheap MS keyboard with numpad. main menu finally accessible but somehow even changing the key binds in the config won't change anything. i can bind any key i like to call the main menu but it sticks to it's former bound purpose :(

crash just before Terms of Service by scanner on Monday March 14th 2016, 15:52

Fedora 23 with Wine 1.9.5

I can sign in with POL and start FFXI. When POL closes and should open the window to accept the license for use, instead the program crashes to a black screen with no music. I feel like I am missing something simple here.

RE: crash just before Terms of Service by Chiitoo on Tuesday March 22nd 2016, 17:33

Sorry for the late reply!

Try running the application via a terminal emulator, and see if there is any interesting output in there before the crash. Please do not paste long output here, but use a pastebin-service such as pastee.org instead.

Have you tried setting Windows version to Windows 7 (or other)?

Have you disabled the opening movie? (May or may not be necessary. Reminds me I need to do some gstreamer testing!)

RE: crash just before Terms of Service by scanner on Tuesday May 3rd 2016, 12:43

Sorry this was on back burner a while.
Is there a way to edit my prior post? I am not seeing a way but would like to clean it up a bit to be less obnoxious.

I redid my wine install and started from scratch.

Now I get past everything to log in. I select character, the pop-up window completes (connecting to lobby and all that). Then the screen goes back and Downloading Data appears in the bottom right. After a mniute or so it throws the 3001 error.

I'm using a windows 10 dxdiagn.dll and using it in windows 10 mode.
Opening movie is disabled. Graphics Stabilization is disabled.

Anyblue, since you're not crashing any longer, I wonder if it wasn't simply a connection issue? Would it be correct to think that the FFXI-3001 error appears after you selected a character to play?

If possible, try other character(s) too (though I imagine you already would have). I've seen players have that issue while playing on Windows/PS2 as well, being unable to enter a certain area or areas (the areas are often located on different servers, which may explain why another area works while another doesn't).

I don't have much else to add at the time, but perhaps save the terminal output from a run, and 'pastebin' it as I recommended before (as the terminal can get quite chatty with this game running).

RE: crash just before Terms of Service by scanner on Wednesday May 4th 2016, 15:30

Re: Wine 1.9.9 - I'm still pretty novice with *nix so I will say...maybe? Unfortunately it will include a full reinstall and patch of FFXI so it'll take a couple days while I learn to properly build from source for Wine and then get FFXI reinstalled.

The 3001 is after selecting a character. I popped up some wireshark and have been digging through my capture but it has changed a lot since I last used (it was Ethereal when I last seriously used the tool) so I'm going slowly.

I will let you know any changes after getting these updates done.

When I run it the terminal window isn't super chatty so I wonder if I am doing something wrong. I tried to turn up my debugging but the files I was teeing to was not that full.

RE: crash just before Terms of Service by Chiitoo on Wednesday May 4th 2016, 15:46

Not long ago it could still be quite complicated to get the latest development versions on binary distributions, but that has become a lot better recently.

Building from source is often the best way to do things, though I may be a 'tad' partial due to being a Gentoo user. :D

As for 'a full reinstall and patch of FFXI', that's not necessary if just changing Wine version (perhaps you had some other changes in mind, too?). It will of course be most clean to always try with a new and clean Wine prefix, but I wouldn't go for that just yet in this case (if the prefix isn't very 'polluted' with installed things).

Even for new installations, one can copy the up-to-date FFXI-files over so the notoriously slow download speeds can be avoided. ^^

Can't get it past the initial ToS/login window by jingai on Friday February 12th 2016, 10:38

I'm on Debian/sid (unstable) running WINE 1.9.3-staging in a 32-bit prefix set to Windows 7. The only winetricks I'm using is quartz. No registry hacks or anything.

I've tried re-installing fresh 3 or 4 times now. I'm installing from the downloadable Ultimate Seeker's Collection on SquareEnix's website. Have installed everything except the final expansion (intend to play on a free server). I did go through the necessary steps to patch up to latest.

After the ToS/login window, directly after "Acquiring Data..." and the window closes, it crashes with the following on the console.

The only thing I did not do is replace dxdiagn.dll, as instructed in the guide above. Is this still a necessary step? I don't have a Windows XP installation handy but I suppose I could install it somewhere for this.. I just am unsure it's still needed.

Last thing to note: I am using the DarkStar Project's xiloader.exe to boot FFXI, since I intend to play on a free DarkStar server.

If anyone has encountered this before and corrected the issue, or has suggestions, I'd be grateful.

RE: Can't get it past the initial ToS/login window by Chiitoo on Friday February 12th 2016, 12:05

I don't remember ever having used an override for 'dxdiagn.dll', so I don't believe it's required. I could be wrong, though!

As for the rest, I'm afraid this is not a support channel that can help you with that. Using this software to play on unofficial servers is (I believe) a direct violation of the software license/agreement of FINAL FANTASY XI, and as such, I feel it's akin to using 'cracks' to bypass copy protection and such (which Wine project doesn't support either).

I could be wrong on that, too, but personally, I can/will not help with this sort of a use case as it's not something I support. :]

I wish you good luck though, in finding out if there's something in Wine that can be fixed to make something else work! ^^

RE: Can't get it past the initial ToS/login window by jingai on Friday February 12th 2016, 12:30

I understand, though there's no modification to the client to do what I'm doing (thus, no 'crack' or anything). The big reason for playing on an unofficial server isn't to skirt paying SE, but more that I simply don't care for the game in its current state, but do considerably care for it circa 2006.

For sake of discussion, since I don't believe my issue stems from the connecting to unofficial servers, maybe we could just assume I'm trying to connect to the official ones ;)

RE: Can't get it past the initial ToS/login window by Chiitoo on Friday February 12th 2016, 13:00

Yeah, I was actually supposed to add something like “it does feel a bit that it may be due to where you're making the client connect to”, because I've not encountered a similar issue before.

But thinking about it more, I'm not sure if I did. My memory has been pretty bad lately. I do have a feeling there might have been something, but at this point in time, I just can't seem to remember nor really think of what to try, as things work pretty much out-of-the-box here.

There is the 'msctf.dll' deal that I have commented on here, under the title: Installation and Opening Movie, but it does seem quite a bit different though, as the game crashes (or crashed) when losing focus only.

I will post a comment of course, if I can remember/think of something “obvious” I can't right now. ^^

RE: Can't get it past the initial ToS/login window by jingai on Friday February 12th 2016, 13:20

The behavior I see is identical to bug 38151 (see his/her backtrace attached there), so I'm not alone with this, but I have tried for several days to figure out why it seems to all work fine for some and not for me (and the people in bug 38151).

RE: Can't get it past the initial ToS/login window by Chiitoo on Saturday February 13th 2016, 8:46

Hm, indeed it would seem so. That must be the thing knocking in the back of my head, trying to make me remember! Heh.

Then again, I may have not thought of it as much, because I have been fairly confident that it might be an OS X-specific issue, but if you're hitting it as well... there must be some common factor somewhere that I don't have so as to be able to reproduce the crash.

Another thing with regards to bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=38151 is that I thought they had their game crash immediately after launching the game from PlayOnline viewer (at the moment the opening movie would play), not at the license agreement stage.

Seeing your comments on both, bug 38151 and 28861 I now remember seeing the mails for those, but likely didn't have anything helpful to add.

RE: Can't get it past the initial ToS/login window by jingai on Saturday February 13th 2016, 16:28

I am bypassing POL so it may still be the same spot it's crashing at. I honestly don't remember the order of events there.. I played the game for 7 years, but I quit around 7 years ago so my memory is a bit fuzzy.. the window I am referring to is the one that has the blue background that kind of looks like interlaced scan lines and begins with a small dialog to Agree or Disagree and then presents a progress bar that ends with "Acquiring Data..."

All of that said.. I just tried your patch and it works! I don't know enough about wine to know what negative effects it might have, but it fixes my problem at least :)

RE: Can't get it past the initial ToS/login window by Chiitoo on Sunday February 14th 2016, 14:41

Indeed, the opening movie would be just before that screen where the agreement thingy appears. It happens as the first thing when FFXI itself is launched from the viewer, and before the screen you see first.

Quite interesting that you're having the same issue there, as the OS X user(s). I've not read of it happening on Linux before this.

If you ever decide to pay for a subscription, it would be interesting to know if it happens without the by-passing of the viewer, too (probably will, but one can probably never be too sure about these things, without actually trying those things out).

RE: Can't get it past the initial ToS/login window by jingai on Sunday February 14th 2016, 21:14

If there's ever another free trial I may give the official servers a go just to see, but as I said I already put my time in on the official servers and really was just looking for the nostalgia of playing it again in the state it was around the time I left.

Do very much appreciate your help with this though :) It's neat to see it all again.

I can't remember when that last happened to me (either never, or somewhere around five years ago).

Some things that I do wonder: does the audio play, and the screen is simply black? Does it seem to be using the CPU? Does it change anything if you set PlayOnline viewer to windowed or full-screen mode?

It might be helpful to show the terminal output from the run (use something like pastee.org to show it, unless the output is only a few lines).

Perhaps do the same with the output from 'glxinfo'.

Another thing to try is Wine without (Staging), although I did just now try 1.9.3 with staging enabled, and things seem to work for me (on Gentoo Linux).

Oh and did you ever run the game before on the same machine/OS you currently are trying to run it on?

Sorry, yes, the audio does play, and when I move my mouse cursor over the window, the cursor disappears, but I can still hear it making sounds when it hovers over the various buttons. So apparently the PlayOnline Viewer is functioning, but not displaying for some reason.

It was previously working perfectly on this same machine when I was running on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, but it stopped working when I upgraded to 15.10.

I finally found a workaround by switching PlayOnline Viewer to run in fullscreen mode, which allows me to log in and play the game, but is still kind of annoying. I would rather run PoL in a window.

Installed using a wineskin wrapper. Everything updated fine, but POL runs suuuuuuper slow. Moving from screen to screen is a horrible chore, every new screen takes ages to load, and I have to spam click for it to recognize any inputs. I haven't yet been able to test the game as it crashed first time (but was also running crazy slow). Checking again as I type this, but it's so damn slow I had to post about it. Anything I can do to speed up POL?

Don't forget to configure your game's resolution in FFXI tool executable to be the same as the display of your Mac in case it is non retina display. For retina display set it to the half of its resolution. E.g. retina display 13" has 2560x1600 so set the resolution to 1280x800.

Please, try to set it up with the same configuration as shown above and let me know if it works better than before.

Have been trying to get this work for a few days now – have followed the guide as well as the one on ffxiah. Unfortunately along the way I slipped up and installed the playonline viewer (via Wine 1.6.2, thru Terminal + MacPorts) in the wrong order, now when I try and go through with the full installation via Terminal I receive an error code when trying to install the PlayOnline viewer, it then goes onto try and install FFXI but it refuses as it does not detect the PlayOnline viewer. I tried uninstalling it via the Wine Uninstaller and it simply cannot be removed. Does anyone perhaps know how I could forcibly remove it?

I do not have any experience with installing as of late. When i did play; if i messed something up, i would reinstall my operating system and start all over, restoring my configuration files for the OS and then installing WINE fresh and then FFXI.
I know this doesnt help very much, but if you have been at it for days, you could always consider just starting over.

> Unfortunately along the way I slipped up and installed
> the playonline viewer (via Wine 1.6.2, thru
> Terminal + MacPorts) in the wrong order, now when
> I try and go through with the full installation via
> Terminal I receive an error code when trying to install
> the PlayOnline viewer, it then goes onto try and install
> FFXI but it refuses as it does not detect the PlayOnline
> viewer. I tried uninstalling it via the Wine Uninstaller
> and it simply cannot be removed. Does anyone perhaps
> know how I could forcibly remove it?

Firstly, if possible, use version 1.7.47 of Wine.

What do you mean exactly by 'wrong order'?

To make sure the Wine prefix is clean, remove it (or move it, or create a new one in a location different from the default ( wiki.winehq.org/FAQ#wineprefix ).

What media did you use to install? I wouldn't trust any unofficial sources; if you have lost yours, SQUARE ENIX is actually providing it here:

At what point exactly did you get this crash you pasted here? When you start the game from PlayOnline Viewer, or when you accept the license agreement? Or other?

I can only comment and help with the first method, as I have no clue what the portingteam is supposed to be (even trying to look at their site, I can't seem to find out what it is they're doing, and it could just as well be a software “pirating” site (though I doubt that), heh).

So, as the first thing, give the latest development version a go, if possible. I think there might be one or two OS X-specific bugs related to this but I can't be sure that's what you're hitting.

Wine shutting down program when I use xbox controller by Devon Healy on Saturday December 13th 2014, 1:47

WHen I try to use xbox controller when I first log on wine will always try to crash the programme, sometimes I get by it by closing the error window quickly but most of the time the entire programme crashes

RE: Wine shutting down program when I use xbox controller by Chiitoo on Saturday December 13th 2014, 1:55

I might guess that this looks like an OS X-specific issue.

Please add some info on your OS and hardware, as well as info on if you have tried on a completely clean Wine prefix, 32-bit prefix, and anything as well as everything else that might come to your mind. ^^

The installer has 7z 'built-in', but it wont find the archives if FFXISETUP.exe runs from a work-path outside of where the archives lie, and will exit (in other words, one must 'cd' to the directory where FINALFANTASYXI.Data.00{1,2,3} are).

Installation works on both, 64-bit and 32-bit prefixes, although on 64-bit, they sometimes freeze. It's still possible to get through by terminating 'ISBEW64.exe' when that happens.

I suggest manually uncompressing the files (open FINALFANTASYXI.Data.001 with your favourite tool that supports 7-zip archives). The FFXISETUP.exe feels a bit slow for the job, and it's possible to make it go quite nuts should the directory already contain the uncompressed files. It will also delete all the uncompressed files upon failure/success.

When manually uncompressed, simply 'cd' to each of the installation directories and run the setup.exe, starting with PlayOnline, then moving on to INS1, INS2, and so on and forth, as needed.

Aside from installation, I've been looking into the opening movie intro cinematics thing (finally). After tracking down what is missing on a 64-bit prefix, I moved to testing with a 32-bit one because winetricks would not like installing some components I wanted to try out.

Surprisingly, the movie actually works out-of-the-box now on a 32-bit prefix, as long as one has Wine built with gstreamer support. The movie will play upside down and mirrored from left to right, however.

One peculiarity comes with having the opening movie enabled: msctf.dll must be native, or the game will crash if it loses focus/isn't the active window any longer.

Windows 7 mode is required to get past the title screen.

That's all, fer now. Can't think of any other long-term issues that should be looked into.

P.S., apologies for the flood of e-mails I may have triggered by cleaning out half of the comments (about 250~). :V

I cleaned out old comments of old issues that didn't seem to have helpful information and were abandoned. Still need to do a second round of reading through all of them, and perhaps compile anything helpful to the how-to section...

Are you having a specific issue with regards to the procedure? If the main setup-executable doesn't work for you, launch each of the separate installers manually from their directories.

I recently did an install with the officially released (not this most recent package, though I imagine it may be the same) installation files, and it worked platinum-like, even in a 64-bit prefix (probably should have created test data from it, me bad).

Anyblue, if you're having issues, please do state them so we can help. Guessing what exactly you need help with might take a while to get to the point. ^^

The ffxisetup.exe should unpack the installation files from those files. If the set-up fails for some reason, you can copy those uncompressed files away somewhere (I believe they will be deleted by the installer in the case of an error).

I had that happen to me, but I forget what the reason for it was, so I'm not sure if it should happen to anyone else or if it was just me.

Look into the directory where you run the ffxisetup.exe, and you should perhaps see what I'm talking about.

ok FFXISETUP.exe ran but missing 7zip which for some reason is required for install. wont work with winzip or anything like that. so getting 7zip installed on ubuntu then will run setup again. I will post my findings so might be bale to help others in the future.

Cannot get controller to work properly with the FFXI config by Matthew on Monday August 25th 2014, 21:29

I am using a wireless Xbox 360 controller, I run the config and it recognizes the buttons but not the Dpad or the Right joystick. I am using Xboxdvr to use it on Ubuntu and i keep attempting to troubleshoot it but i havent had any luck. Has anyone else had this issue?

FFXI installs and updates just fine, but it crashes upon startup by Eric on Wednesday April 16th 2014, 3:19

I am on a Macbook Air (2013) trying to run FFXI in WINE. I've gotten it to work in the past, but I can't get it to work this time around. I followed all of the instructions on here: www.ffxiah.com/forum/topic/22407/my-guide-to-ffxi-on-a-mac/ and on this page as well, but it keeps on crashing as soon as playonline closes and FFXI opens.

I've tried using a version that was made in Wineskin and the problem was the same. I've tried installing WINE via homebrew instead of MacPorts, and the problem remained.

RE: FFXI installs and updates just fine, but it crashes upon startup by Chiitoo on Thursday April 17th 2014, 16:42

Teegrins, Eric!

I'm not sure that I can be of much help due to my inexperience with regards to Mac OSs, but as a quick question, have you disabled the opening movie?

That tends to have some issues still around here, and though I'm not sure if the backtrace you provided looks like it's about the movie; I've got a feeling it doesn't, but it's at least a quick try/check as a first thing that comes to my mind.

WARNING: New fishing system (March 2014 Version Update) will occasionally crash the game by Megas of Vecanti on Friday March 21st 2014, 14:54

About 0.5% of the time, correctly pressing your stick in the direction of an arrow will cause the game to crash. (Both instances resulted from pressing a silver arrow; unsure if there's any correlation.)

Tested at the moat North of the entrance to Port Windurst in West Sarutabaruta while using the Carp Route for skillups. (One RoE (Reel In Small Fish I) was active, though it probably had nothing to do with the crash.)

I've crashed twice. Both stack traces ended up being identical to each other and both resulted in the culprit being:
"0x012f1cf2: divl %esi,%eax"
Since the last few times we got a crash that involved ASM code, it was on the Test Server with unfinished stuff, _IT MAY BE THAT THIS CRASH IS IN THE WINDOWS VERSION AS WELL_. Further investigation is going to be required and if borne out, the bug should be reported to SE. Chitoo? You out there?

RE: WARNING: New fishing system (March 2014 Version Update) will occasionally crash the game by Chiitoo on Friday March 21st 2014, 16:11

Interesting.

I had this weird feeling, after seeing the huge arrows in a picture at the Japanese forums before the implementation, that they might be trouble.

I have not had any crash happen yet, but I'll see if I can't lure it out.

I've actually been fishing quite a bit during the past few months myself! Got the two best rods and skill from 45 to 93, so the adjustments were something I was looking forward to quite a bit.

As a side-note, with regards to “moving the mouse cursor off any side of the FINAL FANTASY XI window can often cause the mouse input to endlessly move in that one direction”, I'm wondering if that's not the 'screen-edge panning'? (Config, Mouse/Cam, Screen Edge Panning...)

I can't remember at this time if it's possible to have it 'stuck' like it oft does with Wine, but I would guess so (would need to confirm, however).

RE: WARNING: New fishing system (March 2014 Version Update) will occasionally crash the game by Megas of Vecanti on Friday March 21st 2014, 16:55

For best replication, try to fish in that moat I talked about and start "Reel In Multiple Small Fish I"; it seems you're almost guaranteed to get that crash by at least midway into the second repeated objective.

Good luck! (Still 20-something and I have to get skill on Dark Bass now...Which isn't happening so I'm considering moving on to the next location. I need me that Shaper's Shawl. /sigh)

Oh wow...I didn't even know that setting existed. I'm ashamed. XD I turned it off; will monitor what happens over the weekend. Thanks!

RE: WARNING: New fishing system (March 2014 Version Update) will occasionally crash the game by Chiitoo on Thursday March 27th 2014, 7:58

I've still not had this happen to me. I've not yet tried to go after your steps, however. I would need to use another character for it, since my 'main' one has “too high” of a skill so that the fish below level 60-70 take their stamina down by themselves pretty quickly. ^^;

I have, however, been fishing cave cherax and liks a bit, and have yet to experience the crash. Matsya seem to be impossible with my skill level after the change (was easy before, just more rare to catch one than now, it seemed). Perhaps the mooching will help...

If the post does not exist at some point, it was about a divide-by-zero crash during fishing. I suspect it may well be removed due to the more or less obvious violation of the user/software agreement, and/or terms of service, that may or may not have been occurred to get that data.

Either way, I probably guess that it may indicate the crash indeed happening within the natural habitat, too.

I'll still try to put some time into trying to get it to happen here, and possibly see if a temporary fail-safe could be created.

I'm trying to play ffxi on mac, wine 1.6.2, Mavericks, Macbook Pro 2013 13in retina, but I haven't had much luck.

Firstly I tried a packaged version of wine, winebottler.kronenberg.org/ which worked fine, up until I got to the actual game, character selection worked fine but once I've selected a character and the game started to load I got nothing but music and a black screen.

Next I tried to install wine myself with homebrew, following this guide www.davidbaumgold.com/tutorials/wine-mac/ , then following the guide on this page to override the DXDIAGN.DLL(although it was a bit vague so not 100% sure I did it right), this again worked fine until I started ffxi from pol, when the opening movie should run I got a white screen and nothing happened, I disabled the opening movie but it didn't make a difference, same thing happened.

So, I though I'd start again from scratch, installed wine via homebrew, and winetricks same way, but now while the installer works fine it doesn't install anything, once I get to the screen were I select which expansions to install I select everything and click next and then it just skips and says FFXI has been installed on this computer. But obviously hasn't. I tried a few different downloads of ffxi but made no difference. I've tried installing wine, and wiping wine completely (rm -rf ~/.wine) but nothing seems to make a difference :(

WARNING: New UI on Test Server Client CRASHES FFXI on disclaimer screen! by Megas of Vecanti on Tuesday August 20th 2013, 23:13

As you may or may not know, the 08/20 Test Server update enabled a preliminary version of the new, revamped PC UI talked about at VanaFest last year. You can enable it by going into the Test Client's ToolsUS/FINAL FANTASY XI Config.exe, scrolling over to the "Misc." tab, and checking the box next to "Enable New UI" at the bottom.

Currently, though, it's unusable on WINE 1.7.0: the game crashes with an Unhandled Exception ("divide by zero in 32-bit code (0x022dd4ba)"; "0x022dd4ba: divl %ecx,%eax" according to the dump below) right after it draws the first new UI element (the right-facing arrow which would be next to the "Accept" option) on the "rules of conduct" disclaimer screen.

Any people in a position to fix the bug will want the full crash dump with symbols enabled, which is here:
pastebin.com/v399Y87G

This obviously needs to get working: good luck to all of you willing to make it work ASAP!

Indeed. I put about 12 hours of staring at relay and other traces as well as the Wine code, and while I am quite confident I know why the crash happens, I haven't been lucky enough to stumble upon a fix. I also don't know enough to fix it myself without some help, and wasn't lucky on that at IRC.

My content ID will become inactive in a day (if it's not already), so I wont be able to test it more. :/

In short, it looks like being pretty much what bug 20847 describes. It looks like it's looking for the Alps Condensed font, uses AR PL UKai CN instead, and there are being zerœs returned (I tried different fonts, even the Alps Condensed, which it wouldn't use even.

RE: WARNING: New UI on Test Server Client CRASHES FFXI on disclaimer screen! by Megas of Vecanti on Tuesday September 3rd 2013, 23:40

Hey, stop acting like this is over. XD It won't be until 20847 is legitimately fixed and the new UI can actually work out-of-the-box. If we can get past this hurdle, it _should_ be the last major change to the FFXI client until such time as SE cuts the PS2 cord and goes full DX9. (And we can concentrate on those remaining graphical flaws which may or may not be WINE's or SE's fault.)

In my experience, it's about the closest thing to nailing a bug. We have the solution, now we need a diff/patch, and need to popularize the diff/patch such that enough people KNOW about it, and it starts gathering attention from the wine devs. That's what Gani and I did... that's the reason you see the ratings on this game jump from garbage/bronze to silver at around this time 5 years ago. I called it cheesecake soon's the third person came in rating it silver.

Unfortunate part with this one, though, is that we don't have a sudden, otherwise inexplicable jump in the game's ratings to draw attention to it. The IRC method may be the most viable.

Making patches is trivial, making a real fix is another story. I don't believe this is a proper way to fix the issue(s), as it's simply forcing a returned 0 into a 1. It doesn't cure the cause, and I highly doubt it would ever go into the Wine tree (that is, I don't think Julliard would approve, and I don't think I would either!).

I guess the actual issue lies within the code of FINAL (or FAINAL, heh) FANTASY XI Online, and I'm not too sure they will ever fix it, as it's likely not affecting Windows. We can find a graceful way to deal with it, something like replicating a bug, or insane behaviour, rather.

I made sure with Austin at IRC that they, too, think that it's probably not worth a new bug as it's very similar indeed to 20847, and they will probably be handled in the same way,.. eventually.

Anyblue, since I stated the patches would be trivial to make, I guess I should deliver some, if you really really want me to! Had to do a bit more since there seems to be regression in git since few days ago, namely the commit:

Note that I'm not aware what sorts of issues these patches could possibly cause, so do use them at your own peril. ^^;

I did try to make sure to test them all individually, so they should be OK concerning their functionality, but I seem to have a habit of making weird mistakes like forgetting parenthesis somewhere or something like that, So if something doesn't click, apologies for that in advance from Dragoy (of Fenrir)!

Firstly, not that I have tested it too much (very few times have I logged on the test-server after the divide by zarrro bug), but the while I did, it didn't crash for me after the fix.

Are there any specific things you experienced that with? I feel as if the new UI might not be working too much different from the old one in ways, as there's quite the performance drop when it's visible compared to how the game is running while it's hidden.

I should like to test it on Windows, but I've been too lazy fer that.

As for the font, I'm not entirely sure what it would require for Wine to use it. I merely tried copying it in, and even removing the ones it looked like it was substituting it with, but it would simply use another one instead (perhaps it didn't seem like a valid candidate for some reason).

I didn't look into that any more than that, and I haven't been hanging out in the IRC lately, but I'll definitely make a note of it here if I ever get to it!

RE: WARNING: New UI on Test Server Client CRASHES FFXI on disclaimer screen! by Megas of Vecanti on Monday December 30th 2013, 10:04

Yeah, the only issue for me is the font--the internal Alps Condensed is completely ignored and the new UI defaults to 8px Times New Roman. It seems to work fine except for that.

The font that WINE saddles the UI with is barely readable. It really warrants investigation. Haven't tested the UI extensively after the recent Test Server update, though, so at the moment I'm unaware of any new issues.

(If all goes well, BTW, I'll be submitting a new general test result in a few days.)

Well, against my beliefs, I've solved the mystery. Or so I maybe think.

I'll try not to go on for pages about what all I did during the few days I looked into it, as it was very much a learning experience; new grounds for me, so to speak.

So... after I confirmed that no matter what I did, 'AR PL UKai CN' was chosen for me, as was the first time I looked into this a bit, and if that was not available, then another one from the arphic fonts was used. It was chosen even if I forced substitution via the registry (more on this later on).

When I noticed that, I started to look more into the 'Alps Condensed' font itself. Fontforge immediately reported various errors, ones that which might cause Windows to ignore the font altogether, so I fixed things here and there to no avail.

As I was testing the font in Notepad, where it worked(!), I noticed that the charset that was requested for it was 0 there, while FFXI requests 128. As one might suspect, this seems to refer to SHIFT-JIS (if I understand things right).

I suspect Windows rejects the font as well, since it has no support for the 128 charset (or it's broken; can't tell for the time being). It sort of looks like a mix of 'Arial' (Arial Unicode?) and 'Times New Roman'... or something like that.

I believe I confirmed this all by hacking on the Wine 'freetype.c' a little bit, making it so that if it sees the particular font, and codeset 128, the DEFAULT_CHARSET would be forced.
This allowed 'Alps Condensed' to be /finally/ used, but any Japanese that still is around in some menus would be seen as 'blocks', as I more or less expected.

It's possible to substitute 'Alps Condensed' without altering any actual code, as long as the font used has support for the 128 charset, such as 'MS Gothic'. Earlier I had only tried 'DejaVu Sans', which was the first and pretty much only font that came to my mind without thinking about it further.

So all in all, it would seem to me as if Wine is actually doing things correctly here. Which font it chooses varies with what is available (arphic fonts likely being on the very top). I guess they haven't decided on the font at the SqEX side yet.

Japanese character display is of course desirable due to the fact that there be Japanese players around on the same servers.
I guess they should look into another font... though who knows; perhaps one will be able to select from several, but I guess I might even report this at the official forums. Not that they'll think much of it, I'm sure.

RE: WARNING: New UI on Test Server Client CRASHES FFXI on disclaimer screen! by Megas of Vecanti on Thursday January 2nd 2014, 17:13

Interesting stuff. MS Gothic seems to be close to what SE was using in the screenshots, though the antialiasing makes it a tiny bit difficult to read (regardless, a massive step up from AR PL UKai CN!). Otherwise I think you've nailed it. Thanks!

BTW: for people who don't want to or can't download Windows corefonts, monafont ( monafont.sourceforge.net/index-e.html ) seems like a suitable alternative as it's a spitting image of MS Gothic (probably by necessity, as monafont's targeted specifically at recreating 2ch ASCII art).

Also: is it just me or did the new UI reduce the framerate by about 10 fps this update...?

I was going through what I happened to have, and I must say 'mikachan' looks pretty fun, and rather fitting!

I can't say if the FPS is worse than before. It has been a while since I visited after all, and I didn't spend much time with it. I can say, however, that similar to the old, current UI, there's a big impact on the CPU use and FPS coming from the UI in general.

With this new one it's rather big, too.

I'm wondering if it can actually be font-related'ish. I noticed that the font debug channel alone is able to bring the game to a crawl. One time I counted about 24 lines being repeated over and over so fast that the file was over 1 million lines long in... 30-60 seconds I believe it was.

I tried the old UI and some Counter-Strike: Source to compare, and while they do similar things, they do it quite a bit less. I do wonder if there might be a place for a performance improvement there, but I can't tell. It could be something d3d-related just as well.

By the by, opening key-items that haven't been checked before produces a segmentation fault here! I might guess it could have something to do with nvidia-drivers, as I seem to be having such an issue with Terraria as well with new enough drivers, but a quick relay debug look-see shows something about 'want to examine the key item?' and then speak of a 'data/ffxi_menu_window.png', which I can't seem to find...

I don't actually get a backtrace as you seem to. It just very quickly segmentation faults away before anything like that is produced.

As for the files, yeah, I don't tend to do /that/ sort of mining, but the references seemed to be to an actual png-file, possibly under one of the data paths under PlayOnlineViewer installation path where one can find some menu files in png form, though they don't quite seem readable.

You might be correct though.

I also did a file-check to be safe on having all the required files, but no problems were found.

Confirmed key item crash on Windows, as well as Alps font not being used even if it is installed.

Also noticed that, in my mog house, FPS would go downwards to 20 or even slightly below (it's literally full (80 items) of event items from holiday trees to the spinet and nearly all of the statues etc., which is nice to see as I had imagined it to be a Wine thing mostly.

When playing with Wine though, I tend to force the CPU to do things a bit more so I actually might get better performance when using Linux, it seems. ^^
It's been about 3-4 years since I last played FFXI on Windows, so I wouldn't remember (I believe last I booted Windows at all was on 15th of June; but it was useful today, although it failed updating itself, but I digress).

So, sum-summarum: Windows does not use the Alps font, 'key item crash' is not Wine related (working “as intended”), and performance drop induced by the UI is also very noticeable when running natively on Windows.

RE: WARNING: New UI on Test Server Client CRASHES FFXI on disclaimer screen! by Megas of Vecanti on Friday January 3rd 2014, 20:34

Oh wow. Yeah, I guess both the crash _and_ the font issue need to be reported to SE on the official forums if they haven't already.

It's also gratifying to see WINE maintain a kind of performance edge. I'd long ago noted the difference in login speed between the few times that I'd logged in on native Windows and WINE--there's like a second-and-a-half reduction on WINE; barely noticeable but nevertheless there.

I guess that wraps things up until the next Test Server update. Kudos all around, man! Thanks for taking the time to boot into native Windows. XD

(BTW, there's actually _one_ issue that needs explanation: the Opening Movie. Have you ever gotten it to work? Supposedly it works if you use native d3dx9. Tried it and no dice.)

I didn't see it reported yet; not even on the Japanese side, and I only looked at some of the more recent posts the last time I checked. I remembered the recent update doing something with the key items, but I can't remember why, or what (probably nothing).

Will look more into it sooner or later.

(As for the Opening Movie, I can't remember my experiences playing it via Wine at all... Will definitely look into it, hopefully sooner than later, and will post a comment if I can find anything interesting at all.)

RE: Gentoo use flags? by Megas of Vecanti on Thursday June 27th 2013, 16:48

The emerge output would typically only help you in the event of a build failure. That isn't the case here--the issue here is most likely with the emulation, which means you need debug output from WINE itself.

Please enable debug symbols by rebuilding your current version of WINE with:

FEATURES="nostrip" emerge wine

Once it's rebuilt, run POL, request the debug output from the "pol.exe has failed and has to close" window as soon as it crashes. Copy the _full text_ of that output into the "New Paste" text field on pastebin.com and click Submit. Copy the link to the file you just made and paste it here. (Copying the entire debug output into a reply can flood out other messages and is advised against!)

The Backtrace section will most likely tell us where things went wrong, but the other sections may also hold clues.

RE: Gentoo use flags? by Megas of Vecanti on Saturday August 17th 2013, 14:54

The error that causes the unhandled exception is:

>0x7d7f1545 DSOUND_ReopenDevice+0xaa5 in dsound: divl %ecx,%eax

...So you're correct. The problem seems to be occurring when dsound tries to initially open the device and fails.

There are several ways you can try to fix this:

-Run winecfg _from the console_. From the Default Settings selection, confirm you can play the Test Sound from your current device. _When pressing the Test Sound button, note any errors in the console._ If the sound doesn't play it may be the Output Device you're using. Check your audio drivers, or try another device if available. Post any command line errors here if you get any.

Do the same from the pol.exe application settings, just to make sure. (You shouldn't typically have to change anything here--chances are that if the default audio settings aren't working, they probably aren't working with other WINE applications either.)

-In winecfg, check the Windows Version set for pol.exe. It should be "Windows 7." Set it to that if it isn't. (This may not have anything to do with dsound, but it might help!)

-In winecfg, Check Libraries from the Default Settings selection. If there's an existing override for dsound, check to see whether it's set to native or builtin--FFXI seems to play nicer with WINE's own builtin .dlls. If it is _not_ set to builtin in Default Settings, go into the pol.exe application settings and, if one doesn't exist, create an override for dsound. Set it to "builtin." (If one exists, set that to "builtin" instead.)

-If all else fails (NOTE: YOU SHOULD NORMALLY NOT _EVER_ HAVE TO DO THIS!): ensure all dsound overrides on pol.exe are removed, install the latest winetricks script and issue the following command:

winetricks d3dx9

This will install DirectX9 and make that version of DirectSound the default across all applications without overrides. See if that works.

My audio settings seem to be a bit unique since I connect my PC directly to my TV via HDMI. This was something that took me a while to configure under Gentoo originally.

Anyway, I tried setting it I believe to HDMI 0, and lo and behold the game just loaded instead of my customary immediate dump. I then turned it back to System Default and it croaked again. I closed winecfg and loaded the game and logged in to make sure everything works (which it does).

The funny thing is after logging in I went back to winecfg and my audio is set to System Default and the option I chose isn't there anymore. As long as the game loads I don't mind.

I do notice at least one controller bug has been fixed, the audio seems to have less hiccups, and I'm sure there are many other fixes too, so I greatly appreciate the help finally upgrading to the latest and greatest wine.

The logout/shutdown crash glitch
-I've managed to isolate the cause of this glitch to something easily user-controllable... namely, the "show opening movie" option on the ffxi config. I have no idea why, but somehow, disabling this option prevents the crash from happening.

Crash after Disclaimer
-If FFXI loads, but won't get past the little disclaimer thing without crashing... you MIGHT be in WinXP mode. Try setting Win7 mode. It should work then

Installation
-If you're having problems with installation, specifically, if the installer is giving you a "1628: Failed to complete installation" error message, your WINEARCH is likely set to win64. This seems to be the default for 64-bit systems. To fix this, backup or delete your current ~/.wine and run WINEARCH=win32 winecfg. This will setup a new prefix that will run the 32-bit installers without flaw.

-In addition, the installers all seem to throw the same error messages to console towards the end, namely:

err:ole:ClientRpcChannelBuffer_SendReceive called from wrong apartment, should have been 0x80000002a
err:ole:dispatch_rpc no apartment found for ipid {ffffffff-ffff-ffff-2800-000008000000}
err:rpc:I_RpcReceive we got fault packet with status 0x80010108
err:ole:dispatch_rpc no apartment found for ipid {ffffffff-ffff-ffff-2800-000008000000}
err:rpc:I_RpcReceive we got fault packet with status 0x80010108
err:ole:dispatch_rpc no apartment found for ipid {ffffffff-ffff-ffff-2800-000008000000}
err:rpc:I_RpcReceive we got fault packet with status 0x80010108
err:ole:dispatch_rpc no apartment found for ipid {ffffffff-ffff-ffff-2800-000008000000}
err:rpc:I_RpcReceive we got fault packet with status 0x80010108
err:ole:dispatch_rpc no apartment found for ipid {ffffffff-ffff-ffff-2800-000008000000}
err:rpc:I_RpcReceive we got fault packet with status 0x80010108

...these messages do not seem to affect the install itself, as the game runs as well as it would on a similar windows system

Graphical Glitches:
-Specifically, the only graphical glitches that have stuck out to me are things like glow boxes (like fireplaces, or the entrances to the Bastok MH at night) extending beyond their normal visible bounds (does not affect gameplay), and other little things, like that little fountain kind of across from the L.Jeuno AH. Its "Water" displays outside of its normal bounds, too... but has no effect on gameplay.

-----
Please, if you are testing this game, bear all this in mind... especially the win32 thing. This game does not deserve the garbage ratings it's been getting, just like the number 2 game on the top 25 doesn't deserve the "Gold" rating it's got. I seriously can't eat my cheesecake in peace knowing this game's fallen so far.

I've mentioned before that setting a native msctf.dll resolves the shutdown/logout crash for me. I've had "Display Opening Movie" enabled at the same time without any issues.

(Though the opening movie still doesn't display for some reason; this isn't something I can pin down since I'm not certain _when_ the opening movie is supposed to display on the PC version. A while back someone mentioned that some version of native DirectX through winetricks makes the opening movie actually work, but I've never seen that happen.)

The main issues that stand out to me now are the glow containers and, more importantly, the unfiltered textures: it's annoying to have to be in Adoulin at night and all of the street lamp glow decals look like they're 10x10. That _can't_ be right...

I tend to go for minimum overrides. It's better, in my opinion to have Wine run with NO overrides at all. And that's what I've managed to get. That's really the intent of Wine: to pretty much invalidate Windows' reason for existing as a desktop system. clearly, msctf and the dx subsystems need work. ...converting calls from DX to GL is not exactly an easy task to accomplish, either, and, frankly, I'm surprised wine is able to do it as accurately as it does in the first place.

Odds are, though, if there's a problem, the solution is probably something GLARINGLY SIMPLE. We solved the imm/ime bug in 2008 with a relatively simple sanity patch, which got committed sometime in 2009, I believe. Irony of that situation was, the cause of the problem back then, and the course of action needed to fix it were all outlined in simple terms on MSDN.

Clearly, a number of things have improved with the Wine project in general since 2008 when I came on the scene... or at least, the project in regards to FFXI.

The opening movie is unimportant to gameplay, anyways, but I'm pretty sure when I first played (on windows), it came on BEFORE the little disclaimer screen thing.

I can totally understand why it's important to have an app running without DLL overrides (it's one of the official requirements for Platinum, after all) but from a realistic standpoint, I also want the game to work in the meantime--and it tends to be a very long time before WINE devs get around to sorting most builtin issues out. =\

And I understand that getting the Opening Movie isn't necessary to make the game playable, but it _is_ a feature of the application and therefore one that should be factored into proper emulation in the long run--plus, whatever's blocking the Opening Movie may be blocking other apps as well. "A rising tide favors all boats" etc..

is actually how it is supposed to be (as in, you see the same while running the game in its native environment).
With that in mind, I think there is a good chance that many, most, if not all of that can be re-produced in Windows.

Have you tried that?

At least I seem to remember seeing the block-pattern way before moving on to Linux some 3 years ago.
My memory might well fail me though!

I'll try to look into the opening cinematic some time soon (I hope), and see if I can dig something up.

Hm. I see your point on the filtering... The clouds, though, I've noticed that same thing looking UP at the clouds in Konschtat back in 2005... on Windows. So that's more of a game issue and less of a wine issue. I'll have to get access to Adoulin and swap out my drives so I can see if the same thing happens in Windows with the light decals, though.

And I see where you're coming from on the movie thing, too. There's two important factors regarding that particular issue. The first, and most glaring, is the crash if no DLL overrides are present and "Show Opening Movie" is ticked. The second, while not important to gameplay for this game in particular, is that the video doesn't display without very specific settings... and you're right in saying that it could negatively impact playability of other games... or worse, usability of other apps in general.

The imm/ime issue in 2008 was a simple fix. This one, though... totally different story. It's clear we're dealing with an issue across multiple dlls.

I'd hesitate to call it a cascading failure, too, though. ...But the only way to determine if it IS a cascading failure is to somehow get the video to play, WITHOUT the msctf override. If the video can be played WITHOUT that override, but the game still crashes on /shutdown, then there are two independent, connected, but non-cascading failures in the builtins. On the other hand, if the video plays AND /shutdown or logout works properly, then it's a localized problem with the DLLs responsible for playing the video - and a cascading failure.

I'm a network engineer by trade, so I understand all about cascading failures. wine is notably unstable... and I don't mean that in a BAD way, I just mean everything is under constant development. It's possible this could be an issue with BOTH system libs. on the other hand, it could be an issue with one, that's causing an issue with another, that's causing the game/POL to crash on exit - a cascading failure... I'll have to look into it sometime.

On a hunch, I decided to switch to the builtin dxdiagn.dll ... guess what? It works perfectly. so it seems the override it no longer needed. Guess if you give a project five years, these things happen.

So, lets see, total number of changes to be made to the howto:
WINEARCH=win32 for 64-bit systems
dxdiagn.dll
Seekers of Adoulin needs to be added in

Things that are still issues:
Shadows, the glow box for fireplaces and whatnot, strobing effect on some lamps, the defocus/refocus gamepad glitches in windowed mode, also, oversampling (setting the background res higher than the overlay res) seems to have no effect.

All in all, the game is VERY playable. Thus far, I've had no real issues with it. Worthy of Silver, possibly Gold... not Platinum, though... at least not until the problems mentioned above get fixed.

I know. I mean, when Gani and I rated the game Silver back in 08, sure it was a gambit. But it worked, right? I just don't see why this game, which has ranked NUMBER ONE on the top 25 and WORKS has a Garbage rating, where the game that's number TWO on the top 25 doesn't work for CRAP, and has a Gold rating.

Seriously, if there's a problem with people rating stuff too high, it ain't here.

And, feel free to correct me here, but isn't the whole purpose of the rating system so that improvements and regressions can be monitored?

The ONLY setback this game has had was the installer malfunctions because on 64 bit systems, wine defaults to functioning as wintendo64.

...and the installers, for whatever reason, don't play nice with that, so WINEARCH=win32 needs to be set. That's really all there is to it.

Virtual Desktop and Gamepad Bug by Pandoraxero on Sunday May 19th 2013, 11:44

OK, so I decided I was going to try the FFXI Windowed mode... and when the window loses focus, then regains focus? the sticks on my gamepad become either maxed or zero'd ... can't tell which, but I'm willing to put money on them being zero'd

Interestingly enough, this same thing does NOT happen when using Virtual desktop. Also, in VDesk, the gamepad retains its focus on the window. ...I have no definite explanation for this difference in function, but I can reasonably surmise that, since the windowed mode was NOT built to retain focus, it simply lets go of the gamepad when it loses focus, versus the VDesk mode, where the game THINKS it still has focus, but, in truth, does not. I mean... that IS the way FFXI was designed.

Finally got it working, thought I'd share it, hopefully saving someone from hours of tweaking and searching for how to.
First off: error 1628, it doesn't install. I think it is caused by 64-bit system. Solved it with 32-bit prefix, something like:WINEARCH=win32 WINEPREFIX=/path/to/wineprefix winecfg. Install and run game from there, I do it through terminal. Then I got sound issue, install pulseaudio control settings (sp?) and tell not to use HDMI acceleration. I needed additional pulseaudio -k to get it work.
Next up, mouse and keyboard wouldn't run in fullscreen. Mouse: tick for hardware mouse from FFXI config, for fullscreen to work, I needed to install Compiz Config Settings Manager and enable "Legacy fullscreen support". Also needed to set WINE to Vista from winecfg with options off for letting program manage windows.
Finishing touch was hiding Unity-toolbar: System Settings ->Appereance->Function(sp?)->hide on.

RE: FFXI on ubuntu 12.04 by Pandoraxero on Friday May 17th 2013, 12:09

You're doing great things for the Community. Your workaround fixed my installation issues on 64-bit Gentoo, as well. I want you to know your efforts are greatly appreciated by one of the 2008 FFXI/Wine team.

RE: For those of you wondering... by Niashi on Sunday March 31st 2013, 14:06

Have to be careful; it uses .NET framework to actually handle the copying. My other half and I *thought* we had installed SoA, but it silently failed because we didn't have the right version of Mono and no .NET installed. So we just winetricks mono to install the Windows version of Mono and all was good.

Okay, so I think I figured out what the is causing my problem below, but need some help.

It seems that when FFXI closes improperly, or the wine folder is tampered with (either one) there is a chance that the registry key for Wine will get messed up in regards to POL. I've been trying to fiddle with the registry that I have to get it to work again, but can't figure out what the infringing line(s) is(are). If anyone can send me their registry from wine with a functioning FFXI install (preferably one installed with through steam so they're as close as possible) I would really appreciate it.

FFXI on mac installation failure by cadozh on Friday July 13th 2012, 10:49

Hi everyone,

I have followed the guide on the following link (killingifrit.com/forums/topic/184046-guide-for-ffxi-on-mac/) but I couldn't finish installing Playonline viewer, I got an error message saying 'wine: Unhandled page fault on write access...starting debugger ... and then nothing happens. Now when I try to run the .exe file again i get an error message from X11 saying it cannot replace the old files.

Crash with macro palette switching: by Megas of Vecanti on Wednesday April 18th 2012, 20:47

While I was confirming the self-resolution of 30339 tonight I found a new crash: Scrolling through my macro palette sets by holding a shoulder button plus the D-pad (or Ctrl/Alt+arrow keys) causes FFXI to crash when reaching a specific set.

Details as I get them. Should be able to easily obtain log info, but I need other people to attempt to reproduce this on their systems and get back to me. Can anyone check?

3. Verified with GamePad Tester that all buttons/joysticks were responding.

4. Attempted to setup GamePad with polcfg.exe. It failed because it does not seem to recognize when I am pressing "Button 1" - even though I can see it happening with GamePad Tester. To fix this I modified the registry settings under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/PlayOnlneUS/SquareEnix/PlayOnlineView/Settings/Controller. In my case I set (in dec):

Before I started testing this looked like this: 4,6,11,7,10,2,0,1,3,8,-1,-1,9,33,33,32,32,37,37,34,34,41,41,40,40,5,-1

The main thing I was trying to fix was that the 4 buttons on the left of the joystick were not able to navigate menus or target things within the game. Changing positions 22 = 4, 25 = 6, 26 = 6, and 27 = 7 seemed to solve that.

However, I still seem to be having a problem. Even though I can see with GamePad Tester that the X button is "Button 15" (14 w/r to the registry number, as it starts counting from 0) and the O button is "Button 14" (13), it still will not work.

The mouse works for the confirm function, so I don't know if somehow its poling that instead of the gamepad or what is going on.

Windowblinds/zfighting by Michael D on Monday February 7th 2011, 18:22

I would just like to note that i am seeing the same dynamic lighting issues from running in Linux appearing on windows. it seems this may be part of how FFXI works and the new drivers from both ATI and nVidia.

RE: FFXI loads to game, but no textures apear. by Wayne Cameron on Friday March 11th 2011, 15:48

I am having the same issue here. I have a intel I5 processor, intel hd graphics with updated drivers running mint linux 10.10 and wine 1.2.2 the stable release. i have tried all versions of wine and they all do the same. and help would be very appreciated Thank you

RE: FFXI loads to game, but no textures apear. by Wayne Cameron on Saturday March 12th 2011, 15:19

well i think it may have fixed it because the opening screen looks normal now but after installing the package i cannot enter any area's gonna try something here that i thought of and see if it is that simple

For the past few months, I've been reading very mixed reports of the newest proprietary drivers (Catalyst/FGLRX) released by ATI. Some reports were very promising, with people saying they reached a level comparable to nVidia's proprietary drivers. Some reports still still report that there is still a wide gap, especially when it comes to gaming under Wine.

So, has anyone had any success playing FFXI on Linux with the recent versions of the ATI Catalyst drivers?

On my old computer that has an nVidia card, I was able to get FFXI performance under Wine to equal (or in some cases beat) the performance I got under Windows.

My new computer has an ATI card in it, and I left Windows on it for awhile since I was using other programs for school that needed Windows. So, before I go through the hours long process of installing and updating FFXI again on my computer (running Linux now), I was curious to know what experiences others have had with the newest drivers.

I just bit the bullet and installed the game on my Ubuntu 10.04 install and I have to report that... other then the graphics being somewhat jerky it's very playable and looks very nice.

I'm going to upgrade to the newest version of Ubuntu and the newest catalyst drivers, so hopefully that will give me some performance increase. Overall I was pleasantly surprised that it worked as well as it did given the ATI horror stories I've heard.

Its all working, except Wings of the Goddess by Bryan on Sunday August 1st 2010, 10:47

So I finally got this working, except for Wings of the Goddess. Durring my last set of problems, I tried uninstalling and reinstalling everything, but when I did Wings of the Goddess never dissapeared from my list of things I could uninstall, and it never really looked like it went through the process of taking it out.

Now when I login it tells me that not all the expansions are installed, so I tried to install Wings of the Goddess again, but every time it gets to the "copying files" phase and Wine gives me an error and forces it to close.

I should probably mention again that I'm using the 2007 collection, so Wings of the Goddess is a separate expansion disc. I have a feeling that there is just some misunderstanding where the computer thinks its not there so it won't let me use it, but the files are there so it won't let me install. Any ideas?

RE: Its all working, except Wings of the Goddess by Bryan on Sunday August 1st 2010, 13:48

Figured this one out. Just had to completely uninstall everything in Wine through a command I found for terminal, then reinstall everything again so it would let me install Wings of the Goddess. A lot of work, but oh well. Now to wait another 6 hours for the updates.

RE: Crash when switching windows by Megas of Vecanti on Sunday June 6th 2010, 20:31

As of 1.2rc2 this issue occurred when I tried POL and FFXI in non-managed Windowed mode...So POL no longer renders to black for me, but now it crashes as soon as FFXI loses window focus the first time. >SiGh<

You'll probably want to do what I've been doing for the past several WINE versions now: go into winecfg settings for pol.exe, set a virtual desktop of whatever size you might need, then go into the POL and FFXI config programs and put them in fullscreen mode.

That should give you the game again--but introduce a couple of other problems you may not be familiar with, namely FFXI's behavior of auto-warping the mouse pointer in fullscreen mode and WINE's changing the gamma correction of the X session to whatever FFXI set it as. Ugh.

I tried installing/running FFXI in the above configuration but I couldn't get past the FFXI install.

I used the original PC CDs (FFXI 3 install disks into one folder and all the other expansion disks on their own folders).

Before, with Ubuntu Jaunty and version .96, the game would work fine in the same computer, but now with 1.2rc2, the game doesn't install right.
PlayOnline install finishes fine, and I can launch it, but FFXI install hangs at about 26% and gives me an MSI error.

I noticed that 1.2rc1 has been tested Gold on Lucid 64 bit, but using apt-get, it automatically downloads 1.2rc2, there's no deb package for 1.2rc1 that I can find for Lucid 64, and I'm pretty much an idiot at trying to build 1.2rc1 from source, but after I did, it was the same install error as 1.2rc1.

page not found normally means you are having a problem with language settings.
what i did to solve this was to use the vanadiel collection 2008 dvds. i hear that you can use the installer from the POL website as well. it is found in earlier posts.
when i still got a language problem, i deleted the playonline EU registry entries (i am in US with US disks) and ran polcfg, changed settings and ran again.

also, for the black screen, there are some previous posts. setting a virtual desktop and making its resolution 640x480 seems to have fixed it for me.

Just a note for those with the 2007 collection: It works too. Make sure your operating system is set to Windows XP through winecfg, and go into the PlayOnline directory on the DVD, and right click setup.exe and go to run with and type wine(or navigate here through the terminal and type "wine setup.exe") do the same for the INST1 INST2 INST3 etc. directories. Happy Adventuring!

Got this installed with the alpha build linked via WineHQ's suggestion for Snow Leopard. It works to 95% of what I expect. A few things I've noticed:

POL Config will not recognize the Mac's screen resolution properly, and defaults it to 640x480. Registry tweaks will fix this issue.

The thing that is keeping me from being 100% satisfied is that whenever I tab away from the program (specifically FFXI), it crashes. I've tried switching to windowed mode, which does indeed put the program in a movable window, but still crashes on change. I'm able to screencapture and do other processes in the background fine, I just can't target or highlight them, or it crashes. When it crashes, the sound continues but the rest of the program is frozen.

Closing the program causes it to freeze/crash, yadda yadda. The Mac alpha release has a really nifty way of just closing the program via the icon at the top, which makes it nice and easy when it does crash.

Any hints or suggestions to the whole "crashing on tabbing"? If I can find a way to get a log, it will be posted.

RE: Working with WINE for Mac by Pandoraxero on Sunday January 17th 2010, 23:25

excellent that we finally have a mac user in here to confirm working status. if you don't mind, please be sure to post your working status sometime (i can't post mine, as i run git-wine, but it seems to be running fine in Gentoo :) )

RE: Working with WINE for Mac by Kris on Friday February 26th 2010, 23:24

I'd love to, but due to the Credit Card issue, I could not actually ever play for long. Now i'm getting back into it, and I'm having trouble with what I can only guess is POL's network not recognizing my version (throwing a POL Error 1160). Soon as I get around it, I'll see if I can get it working. Currently using the updated alpha build from the given link here. WINE version 1.1.35

I have been thinking of posting here but I have not done it until now.
Me and my wife are both playing FFXI fulltime on both of ours Debian systems.

It have gone a few months (one year to be exact) now from when we moved over to linux for FFXI.
We both plays with gamepads and in fake window mode (wines desktop emulation)

The biggest "problem" that we have with FFXI on our system is the shadow rendering from caves etc. (flickering + hard edges on the shadow "sprite")

So let me list our systems and (hopefully all) our configurations.

Debian unstable + testing
(got links to both type of repositories in my source.list file)
wine 1.1.13
(with IME fix + a personally fix for the rumblepack on the gamepad. I changed the code so it wouldn't try to guess the rumble-type and instead use one specific)

The following info is based on a clean installation of Ubuntu Jaunty(9.04) and Wine-1.1.28

The absolute fresh installation helped ensure that no other items had been installed somewhere by some program that by chance helped the installation and runtime of Final Fantasy XI( FFXI ), thus potentially giving false results to the installation and runtime testimonial.

I have performed this task several times thus far with plans to perform further testing using the various hardware I have laying about.

The system hardware I have thus far tested on is my Intel 3.0GHz Hyperthreaded mainboard with 3GB and then later 4GB of system memory. I have also performed once using one of the 256MB graphics card(the 5200 witch I will spec out shortly), upon my Intel 3.0GHz single-core with 2GB of system memory.

--NOTE: The following stable-release NVIDIA drivers have been tested with these cards:
180
173

Once the 3D drivers were installed and the system rebooted fine without any hiccups, I downloaded the source for the latest( at time of this post ) version of Wine, version 1.1.28

While Wine was downloading I fired up the Terminal and grabbed the dependencies needed for building/running Wine.

CODE:
sudo apt-get build-dep wine

Once Wine was downloaded and the dependencies were satisfied I extracted the Wine archive and navigated the Terminal focus to the newly extracted Wine source directory. In my case I extracted the downloaded archive to my desktop. In the terminal:
CODE:
cd Desktop/wine-1.1.28

Once inside I ran:
CODE:
./configure

Followed by:
CODE:
make depend && make

Finally:
CODE:
sudo make install

Once installation I ran post-installation check(again from the terminal).
CODE:
wine --version

Getting an output of "wine-1.1.28" satisfied me so I ran the configuration utility.
CODE:
winecfg

In the resulting configuration utility window I switched the default mode from XP to Vista. Then from the drives tab, performed a auto search of devices. Finally, I selected the audio tab and let Wine figure out my audio( Alsa ), performed a test sound and upon hearing a test sound, I hit the apply tab at the bottom of Wine's configuration utility and exited the utility.

Once Configured I inserted my Final Fantasy XI VANA'DIEL Collection 2008 DVD installation media. Waited for the DVD drive to appear on my desktop and opened the drive file viewer. Once open, I selected the Autorun.exe file and double-clicked.

When The Final Fantasy installer window popped I hit the Install PlayOnline Viewer and TetraMaster button. I left everything default except adding desktop shortcuts. I chose to not add them as in part I hate clutter on my desktop and they do not work anyway without additional post installation tweaking. Of which it is far easier and quicker to right click the startup launch icon once FFXI is installed and add a shortcut to the desktop or launch panel. --Note this is not a FFXI installation failure, this is just something I believe Wine/Ubuntu does not support accurately yet as I have never found this to work.

Once PlayOnline is installed I proceeded to install FFXI and all the subsequent expansions on the installation DVD Autorun Menu. --No need for DirectX 8 installation as Wine has this covered. Once all expansions were complete I exited the installer DVD and navigated to the start-up links now created within the Applications tab of my navigation bar: 'Applications/Wine/....'

Before starting FFXI, It is wise to run the FFXI configuration utility and set the runtime resolution to match your desktop resolution settings. On my Acer X203H LCD I run a 1600x900 resolution. Within FFXI's configuration utility I set the resolution to match my screen -at- 1600x900

NOTE: I have also tested this with an older HP1502 14" LCD running -at- 1024x780 and various( even older ) analogue CRT displays ranging in size from 14" up to 19" with screen resolutions from 1024x780 up to 1200x1024. Each time setting the FFXI resolutions to match my outputs display resolution.

Now, configurations tested ranged from the default settings given within the configuration utility(best for the smaller 256MB graphics cards I tested with), up to the maximum quality settings(best for the 1GB graphics card I tested with).

Once configuration is set(especially the runtime resolution set to match your display resolution), I proceeded to start FFXI from the start-up menu listing.

Upon first run, the PlayOnline viewer( POL ), will need updated, I updated; POL restarted and I submitted my login credentials(I have also tested creating a new account from this prompt with no issues). Once login credentials are supplied, I entered the game; before playing there are updates and depending on your internet connection speed and time of day you perform this task will depend on how long this takes. The shortest update I encountered was less than 45 minutes, and the longest was a little over 3 hours so be prepared to do a lot of waiting.

Once updated, I selected my character(even created/deleted a character), and ran about testing everything I could possibly think of in game. The only performance issues I encountered were related to the video and system hardware I used. No configurations were made to NVIDIA's configuration utility to enhance graphic output--all tests were performed with default settings in place.

Otherwise, the only issues I encountered were the in-game navigation options dialog buttons were unreadable if I ran the game in windowed mode upon the CRT monitors. I do not consider this a bug as this issue is quite common running FFXI on Window's(R) while in windowed mode. Something I have experienced myself and found that countless others have also encountered this issue running Window's(R) according to various Web postings I have found online when I first encountered this issue.

That should do it for this posting. Remember, "SET WINE TO VISTA MODE" and everything should(as I have found in my testing), work out of the box with zero pre or post tweaking aside from the normal use of the FFXI configuration utility that is required to do on a standard Window's(R) installation of FFXI.

Final Fantasy XI rates a Platinum from my findings.

Additionally, I plan to post some results using ATI graphics cards in the near future, and additional system hardware of the core-duo and core-quad variety(not to mention AMD chipsets of the same). --I just purchased an ATI RADEON HD 4350 GDDR2 1GB PCI-E card and plan on finding time to perform a test for this graphics card. I will post my findings once the results are in.

Until next time; Enjoy your stay in VANA'DIEL, but don't forget friends/family/job/school, etc....!!

lock up on target selection by Michael D on Tuesday August 11th 2009, 0:17

i believe i may have discovered the problem with lock ups caused by triggering an event (the same event allways causing a lock up). i recently reinstalled ffxi and did not use the same proceedure as normal (still installing rise of the zilart 10 minutes before dynamis entrance time can make you do funny things) which resulted in several failed attempts to log in that were later fixed (dll overrides and the like). after installing in this way, i found that i was able to encounter these mysterious lock ups that others had discribed (lower jeuno npc selection, for me it was zelecting anything in an area of south sandoria (s) from a certain distance at a certain angle) i am going to attempt to reinstall again using the method i used to and see if this fixes it and post the results.
hope this can help those suffering from this basically just try reinstalling without trying to start pol until all settings are correct

Spinning character and connection issues by Kurakuni on Tuesday June 16th 2009, 15:37

So, I'm using Wine 1.1.23 with Ubuntu 9.04 x64. FFXI runs prefect for me, and I have run into only 2 problems so far; besides the flashing shadows and shadow lag, which it seems everyone has. I just turned off shadows, and deal with the flashing shadows in zones.

Ive came across two problems though, seeing if anyone has them or knows a fix. The first is whenever I switch workspaces, when I come back to FFXI, my character will be spinning in a circle until I move the joystick on my Logitech controller. I thought at first this was just a bad config of the controller, so I re-did that, but nothing. Also, when I first log-in, my character will log in spinning until I move the joystick.

My other problem is with my connection. As long as I'm actually playing, it runs fine without any disconnects besides the usual. Yet, if I ever leave it running for bazaaring or just going AFK for a long while, it eventually disconnects. Before you say, yes I have changed to setting in the game for the auto disconnect, but that still didn't fix it. I'm not really sure what the problem is. I'm running DSL if that helps at all.

Besides that, things are going good so far on it :) Been running it under Linux for about 4 weeks now. Thank you for the help.

RE: Spinning character and connection issues by Cosma on Wednesday June 17th 2009, 1:11

I noticed the spinning too when i switch around between workspaces. I thought it is a problem with my windowmanager (dwm) but it seems that other people have that problem too.
It looks like it is a problem with the mouse cursor position when switching Desktops/Workspaces. But i have no idea how to fix that...

Now to the disconnects. Some ISP's drop the connection after a while and then reconnect. If your router isn't fast enough to reconnect to the internet then it might kill your connection to the FFXI servers. But that would also happen when you play and not just when AFK.

RE: Spinning character and connection issues by Kurakuni on Thursday June 18th 2009, 11:34

Yeah I have no idea what to do with the spinning besides just start disabling things and seeing what happens, and messing with controller options. What kind of controller do you use?

As for the disconnect, I'm also lost. Cause I rarely DC when I'm actually playing, it's just when I'm sitting there doing nothing for a long time. It's as if the game senses no activity and DCs me, even though I have the option turned on not to do that. I need to mess with it more and experiment. Though I'm fairly new to Linux, so I don't know what all I could do outside of the game to test my connection and try to figure it out. Just sucks I can't bazaar.

RE: Spinning character and connection issues by Cosma on Friday June 19th 2009, 7:58

> What kind of controller do you use?
i don't use a controller at all, just usb keyboard + mouse

> Though I'm fairly new to Linux, so I don't know what all I could
> do outside of the game to test my connection and try to figure it out.
i'd start with the hardware first. do you use a wireless lan?
if so, then how far is the router away from your computer or are there walls between them. if not, then go and check your ethernet cables. ffxi d/c if the connection gets droped for too long and you won't even notice that if you surf the web with your browser. maybe it's a problem that you had for a longer time already.

RE: Spinning character and connection issues by Michael D on Friday June 19th 2009, 8:12

I have not been able to reproduce this effect with 1.1.22 or 1.1.23, the only things that i could possible guess that could be doing this are mouse cursor placement (or where the system/application THINKS that the cursor is), mouse button press being reported as held down, or maybe a key press being reported when it is not actually actuated.
I have no idea how to resolve this problem if it is the cause.

RE: Spinning character and connection issues by Teast on Tuesday August 18th 2009, 6:32

Hey,

Sorry for the really late response.

both me and my wife are playing FFXI throu linux all the time now (were months ago that we were in windows)
We also play FFXI with gamepads (PS2 like gamepads) and we are also having the spinning around "problem" most of the times when we logon to FFXI for the first time. We only need to move the stick to "re-calibrate" it.

I don't know how to fix this, but I wanted to notice you that you aren't alone.

My full report on installing the original FFXI disk sets in Wine 1.1.22 in Kubuntu 9.04 Jaunty x86_64. by Randy on Wednesday May 27th 2009, 0:52

I have the Final Fantasy Online disk set with Zilart. It contains one Play Online CD, three FFXI CDs, and one Rise of Zilart CD. I also have all the separate CDs for each expansion pack.

I wanted to get it running under the stable Wine 1.0.1 first but could only get Play Online working with the window mode unchecked in it's config program. Everything else in Play Online worked but FFXI would crash the instant it ran.

I tried to download the Vista compatible Play Online setup file from their website. The setup stops when it finishes extracting the MSI file. I tried to run the extracted file but Wine said to run the setup that extracted it. So I did msiexec /i setup.exe and got the error fixme:msi:MSI_OpenDatabaseW open failed r = 80030050 for L"C:\\windows\\temp\\msid7.tmp
Each time I ran that command I would get a different temp file error. Most threads seemed to think it was related to running Wine in root but I never have and haven't used the sudo command. I got this error in both Wine 1.0.1 and 1.1.22

Next I did a clean install of Wine 1.1.22, installed POL, ran and updated POL, ran it again, and got an error bugs.Winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=17604 I then copied over dxdiagn and set it up in Wine's config for pol.exe. I left it on it's default load order which is "Native then Builtin" and I didn't register it with the regsrv32 command. I ran POL but the graphics would flip upside-down. From other posts, I found that adding the following key with the regedit command fixes this problem:
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine\Direct3D]
"OffscreenRenderingMode"="fbo"
Now POL runs flawlessly.

Next I installed FFXI and all expansion packs.
I had problems with inserting the next disk during the install. First I'd have to insert a CD and click it to open the dolphin file manager, then I had to open the Wine config and go to the drives tab and hit ok to exit, then in console I typed wine d:\setup.exe. If I didn't do any of the previous steps before running the setup then Wine wouldn't recognize the CD. As soon as the insert disk message appeared, I'd have to make sure my dolphin window was closed, then type wine eject d: in a separate console, then insert the next disk, then I'd have to repeat the previous steps I mentioned to get the system and Wine to recognize the CD, then hit retry. If Wine didn't recognize the CD and I hit retry, then the installation would exit and I'd have to start over. After installing the game, I ran pol and started FFXI to download updates. Half a day later(about 11,700 files), I hit ok and FFXI started in full screen mode. Hitting Accept or Decline at license screen would make FFXI go to a black screen so I had to kill it. Next I changed settings in the FFXI config program to my liking, then switched pol.exe to vista mode in Wine config. After that, the game ran almost flawlessly, though my terminal output would show the following:
Probably 1000+ lines of this - fixme:d3d8:Wined3dformat_from_d3dformat Unhandled D3DFORMAT 0x41
I saw 1 line of this - fixme:d3d_surface:surface_load_ds_location No up to date depth stencil location
And about 5 lines of - fixme:d3d8:ValidateVertexShader (0x40de2a0 (nil) (nil) 0 (nil)): stub

Flaws in playing FFXI:
Shadows looked fine but were lag intensive. When turning on Bump Mapping in FFXI's config program, the shadows lagged a lot less but they flickered when moving the camera. In some areas(like windurst woods chocobo stables), the shadows didn't flicker. Shadows for characters can be turned off but they still appear at some doorways.
The game crashes for me when selecting multiple players using the 0 key when they are at the same coordinates(like a home point or after entering an arena).
Minimizing the Wine window seems to close out of the game instantaneously unless in a virtual desktop.
I had a problem at one time in the previous Wine version with POL going out of the Wine window so the Wine window was mostly black. When I moved the Wine window, the POL window would move inside it. I fixed this buy turning off "Allow windows manager to decorate windows" in Wine config, ran pol, maximized it, then made it small again, and it was back to normal. I might have caused this problem by changing settings in KDE for my FFXI window which is actually the POL window too.

I originally had FFXI installed on my Windows XP PC. I could also get FFXI working by copying over the directory and searching the registry for related keys. I don't know what ones are needed specifically but there are quite a few and I needed more than just the main key listed in Software. I still needed the extra configuration for the direct 3D reg key, dxdiagn, and vista mode. Computer Specs: Intel Core i7 2.66, 6GB ram, EVGA GeForce GTX 260 Core 216.

There may be other areas like this but Qu'Bai Arena has a shadow effect on almost the whole floor that causes considerable lag. This still happens even with shadows turned off in the game menu since that option is only for character and monster shadows.

Blank screen after choosing character by Esteban on Thursday April 23rd 2009, 12:36

Hi, i'm getting probs with this, when i enter to choose character part the graphics look slow and after it began logging into the game, it put on blank screen and then it close, resolution 640x480 and have a PNY Geforce 6200 video card, using wine version 1.1.19, any idea what should be my prob?

No window borders/runs in fullscreen mode constantly by David on Sunday April 19th 2009, 10:12

Another little hiccup I noticed with 1.1.19. Now FFXI runs in fullscreen mode by default, and I can't get it out. It's behaving more like it's on a native windows machine now. This wouldn't be a problem except that I have 2 displays and FFXI opens on the wrong one every time, whereas before, I could move the window the to display I wanted it on then kick it up to fullscreen. Heh. If nothing else, I'll try the windower.

RE: No window borders/runs in fullscreen mode constantly by David on Sunday April 19th 2009, 10:41

And another thing... Now it pirates the cursor, I have to alt+tab several times to get it to "let go" of it so I can mouse over the rest of the desktop. I would imagine this is only a problem for systems with 2 or more displays.

And I got it to stop defaulting to fullscreen mode after jacking with a few settings.

A minor improvement I did notice however is that now the animated mouse cursor works in-game.

Game won't exit in 1.1.19 by Alan Gindlesperger on Thursday April 16th 2009, 19:46

I was wondering if anyone else had the same problem (or any ideas on how to fix this). Under 1.1.18 I had no problems running FFXI, however, after the update to 1.1.19, I can log in to the game and play normally (the important part), but I can't exit the game. If I do a /shutdown or a /logout then select "back" at the FFXI title screen, I just get a black screen (if I'm playing in fullscreen mode) or a black window if I'm playing in windowed mode.

Since the game works, I'm not too worried about it, but still, it would be nice if I didn't have to manually kill the game every time I want to quit.

This is actually a reply to Cosma's post under the Getting FFXI to Run Under True Fullscreen Mode thread, however, because the info is so useful, I decided to start a new thread. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think more people will read this if it's a new thread instead of a reply, and I think the information will help a lot of people who are frustrated with getting FFXI to run under Gnu/Linux.

Cosma's suggestion of adding the line "OffscreenRenderingMode"="fbo" to the user.reg file makes a huge difference. I tried it (I didn't edit the file manually, I used regedit and inserted it that way... more detail below)

It does exactly what Cosma says, it stops the flipping of pol viewer, and it fixes the issue with the black bar at the bottom of the screen when you use two different resolution settings in FFconfig.

Not only that, but the increase in FPS is amazing, I was able to turn shadow effects ON, and still play the game with no virtually noticeable decrease in FPS.

Now, you can do what Cosma does and add the line to the User.reg file, or you can type "regedit" in the terminal/konsole (whatever you use) and under HKEY_CURRENT_USER expand SOFTWARE, then WINE. Look for a key called Direct3D and expand that. If it's not already there, create it. In Direct3D create a registry entry called "OffscreenRenderingMode" and set it's value to "fbo"

If this was part of the HOWTWO, I think this came would move up to gold status, as it really takes the gameplay up to near the native Windows level (at least on my machine it did).

Hmm... what version of Windows do you have Wine configured to emulate? I know there's some issues with later versions of Wine running FFXI that seem to be fixed when you make sure that Vista is selected.

I'm running FFXI as fullscreen. As far as wine is concerned, I am not using a virtual desktop. For Wine Windows settings I have the following two items checked: Allow window manager to decorate windows and Allow window manager to control windows. For Direct3D I have Vertex Shader support listed as hardware and Allow pixel shader (if supported by hardware) checked.

I don't have that powerful of a graphics card (nVidia GeForce 6150 SE), but I do use the driver released by nVidia for Linux.

Just to double check, do you have a native Windows copy of dxdiag.dll and did you set winecfg set to use the native Windows version of dxdiag.dll with pol.exe too?

Yeah, this dosn't work for me at all. I set it, it fails. I take it out, it works.

Pol hangs on the very last screen before the game loads. Pol checks for updates then hangs with the white FFXI logo. The pol mouse cursor stop respoinding at this point as well. (This seems to be right before it changes the screen brightness and gamma)

Actually, I don't have the greatest graphics card in the world, and when I play under Windows I have to turn weather effects off.

When I tried this setting in the registry under Wine, I'm able to play with weather effects turned on, and it doesn't get all choppy in heavily populated areas like near the auction house in Jeuno. So, in some respects, my performance is actually increased under Wine.

hahaha, just got on this forum again for the first time in a while, forgot that I actually posted. I get the error when it tries to install. I think I might have a problem with a driver, but my get-apt is on the fritz ever since I tried to install it. I know, I know, I am new to ubuntu, so it all probably is just something simple. But I tell you what, I really need to get that program working. well, not really need, but I miss it alot.

I know this has probably been asked, but everything installed fine but whenever I launch the Playonline Viewer, I get a black screen or funky graphics. But the music plays fine. I am using the same card I used in Windows. I have also tried configuring Wine as best I can to know avail. Anyone else been able to work around this? Thanks!

How to get it to work as of 1.1.17 by Astrit Prower on Tuesday March 17th 2009, 20:38

Set the POL viewer to use Windows Vista, this has an added effect of increasing your framerate at the login screen. When in game set the clipping plane to the lowest setting, turn shadows off and set it to show the minimal amount of characters.

RE: How to get it to work as of 1.1.17 by Woufi on Wednesday March 25th 2009, 5:02

Worked perfectly fine with me, tested on 1.1.13, no more have to wait at the character selection part.
still have some light bugs, depending on where i'm in the game, nothing that annoying.
Thanks for the tip!

Could one of you with wine-debug and wine-devel run "WINEDEBUG=+dxdiag wine pol.exe &> ~/dxdiag_log.txt" from the POL directory and post the contents of the dxdiag_log in a reply? I'm unable to do this from my machine.

Don't quote me on this but I believe our newest problem (FFXI crashes/can't login) arises from IMM errors (component unknown). I think we need to try out WINE with the nabble sanity patch again and see if we get anywhere. (Hint Hint)

1.1.15 has made keyboard glitchy by Jaz on Saturday February 21st 2009, 11:01

Updated to 1.1.15, having had the game running fine in 1.1.14. Had to reapply the imm sanity patch to get into the game.

Once in, I had issues with the keyboard, it was just being really glitchy - macro bar already open when I log in and not going on pressing esc, numpad keys not working for movement, menu spazzing out etc.

Logging out and back in fixed some of these, but I can't type in game at all (not a problem for BST, but can't talk to LS or ask other BSTs to team up lol - also means I can't /shutdown or emote etc). So something seems to have broken with the new version.

Heres my problems.. first off.. Final Fantasy is VERY slow in terms of Frame Rate.. to put it bluntly my character looks like the old school Cactuars when running.. The bottom 1/3 of my screen is a big black box. And finally I notice sometimes my controls from keyboard goof.. like im typing.. lets say in LS.. and if I type "s" it changes from /linkshell to /say.. kind of annoying. What are the optimal Settings for FFXI to work? Im doing this on a dummy rig before I port it to my Macbook. Im using Wine 1.1.14

FFXI not running after Update by Martin Junginger on Sunday February 1st 2009, 5:16

I updated from Wine 1.1.13 to 1.1.14 and I'm no longer able to play.
Playonline Viewer is working ok. Switch to FFXI works, but after click on "Agree" on the first screen, the window turns black and stays this way (ended the test after 10 mins)

RE: FFXI not running after Update by Terry on Monday February 2nd 2009, 22:40

For those like me that upgraded to 1.1.14, I just thought I'd mention it's quite easy to downgrade back to 1.1.13. Assuming your on Ubuntu remove Wine by doing something like "sudo apt-get remove wine" at a command prompt, then download the 1.1.13 version from wine.budgetdedicated.com/archive/index.html. Download the appropriate file for your version (probably the one labeled Wine 1.1.13 i386) and double click the file to install. You shouldn't lose any settings, I didn't. Works fine again for me.

wine 1.1.14 is really bad by michel on Friday January 30th 2009, 15:56

i installed wine 1.1.14 today and i cannot get into FFXI anymore, when i come in playonline and click on play the game freezes and thats all and i need to close wine, i tryed it 4 times or so but still freezes when i click play, so there is now a new problem that put FFXI back to garbage.
i use ati btw i dont now of nvidia users got the same problem, i tryed with compiz on and off but still the same and with compiz turned on i get somtimes a black screen in playonline

My gamepad worked out of the box and in the first try (after configuring the game to use it of course), i have OpenSuSE 11.1 and i installed the game under wine 1.1.12 (now have 1.1.13 without reinstall or problems).

My gamepad is a Logitech Cordless Rumblepad 2 and the only thing that didnt work is the force feedback.

And i just dont know why this game is still Silver. I have tried Gold games that looks horrible in comparisson to this one. I have been playing FFXI on wine since 2 weeks and the graphical bugs are almost none (very few instances like summoning an earth elemental and changing day and night for like 2 seconds) and the frame rate is almost the same as windows.

Only hack i did was the dll thing to make it work and thats it, the game install, do their update and was in game almost like in windows with the lag issue in the begining, but seriously is not that bad, Ctrl+t and it is gone. You can play for hours and dont see that lag again.

If I can get FFXI to run how I would like in Wine then I think Linux will have a new convert! :) Has anyone tried to use Windower with FFXI in Wine with any success? (I have all my macros in that format)

OK! It seems i found the solution, Changing hostname using "sudo hostname localhost" seems to work =)
You need to always change this when booting computer, heck you could even do script for FFXI which changes it when you execute it and when you end it it changes it to back if needed.

Weird, ima getting error when pressing accept button "Error with connecting to lobby server" or something like that Error number was 3101 ive tried Square support but nothing.. Ive tried to add 127.0.0.1 localhost to hosts file but no luck..

I wonder what is this. I dint get this when i had that crappy ati card.

A few odd items and a thought by Astrit Prower on Sunday January 18th 2009, 1:42

Amongst my latest test I found a few interesting items. The first was the graphics. I don't know how but FFXI looks crisper in WINE than a real windows install, not to mention faster loading. The POL viewer doesn't crash when I try to access my mail in WINE.

Again I don't know what it is, but some windows apps are running better in WINE the windows. This also applies for other apps I maintain.

I can confirm that FFXI works wonderfully on an ASUS M3N78-VM. Im running 4 GB of RAM, 512 MB to the on board NVIDIA graphics chip on Ubuntu 32 bit.

Aside from some slight flickering, the games runs as fast as it does in Windows XP. Some things (such as the loading of character models) actually seems faster. In heavily populated areas, characters are shown almost immediately. The settings are exactly the same as the Windows install (I copied the game to .wine).

Also, for those of you who may have trouble getting past the install process, heres a tip. I could NOT for the life of me get past the FFXI update process. PlayOnline update went smoothly, but the game upgrade kept exiting with errors unexpectedly at various points (from 3% to 17%).

To get around this so that you can test settings, just copy the contents of C:\Program Files\PlayOnline\SquareEnix\FINAL FANTASY XI with a recently updated version of the game over to ~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/PlayOnline/SquareEnix/FINAL FANTASY XI AFTER you have installed PlayOnline and gone through initial game and expansion set ups.

I found that after doing that I was able to get on and play despite the fact that the update process kept failing. Even when I used the same settings.

Same results of F1 + Enter + Enter can be achieved using just Ctrl+t to open a /tell in game. I do this all the time and it works (and is just a lot faster xD).

I have weather effects on and the only graphical bug seems to occur when someone or I summon an earth elemental (dont know why) and when day and night change for an instant (like 2 seconds).

Didnt try the keys formenu since i always use Gamepad, and it worked for me flawlessly since the very begining and w/o any tweaking. I have a Logitech Cordless Rumblepad 2, only thing i see is that the force feedback isnt working.

The POL upside down thing doesnt bother me since the only thing i do there is press a button.

I have a Core2 Quad Q6600 processor + NVIDIA 8800 GT 4GB RAM, and i have now almost 2 weeks of playing under linux only. Excelent Job Guys.

ok, so i got the game installed, updated, and everything, i can get into the game, but first off i get no sound at all, secondly i can only see the top left hand corner of the world, chat log and hp/mp bar are still visible, game seems to run fine, cept those 2 things, any suggestions?

Ok I found that I had to actually change my numbers a little from windows in order to make it work properly. I'm not too familiar with widescreen resolutions but heres what ended up working on my standard res machine, hope you can adapt it to your needs and let me know how it works. 1280x960 and 1280x960 (notice the weird 960 part... thats to account for the title bar width at the top of the window). Anyway I'm pretty sure the resolutions have to match each other so I'd start by setting them both to 1440x900 or whatever you want the actual resolution to be.

Only suggestion I've got is to close everything else that might use sound before you run the game. I read that pulseaudio has some major issues as far as playing nice with other apps so give that a go (i.e. run it right after a fresh reboot) then all i had to to once i tracked that down is close the program(s) using pulseaudio and yes that includes firefox or any web browser. Then execute this in terminal:

sudo /etc/init.d/pulseaudio stop
sudo /etc/init.d/pulseaudio start

Hope that helps. Outside of that I don't know a whole lot about how sound is handled through linux yet.

Cannot get the game to display after starting by Shaun on Saturday December 13th 2008, 21:14

I did everything and I can get into the game as far as where it asks you to accept the conditions, but after that when it goes to take me to the main FFXI screen, it has the sounds but no display whatsoever. I am running the latest wine on Ubuntu 8.10 with a HD3850 ATI video card.

RE: Cannot get the game to display after starting by Shaun on Friday December 19th 2008, 7:36

Thank you. I was able to get past that but then when I get logged into my character, my FPS is so low and I cannot open my menu to even change my graphics options to fix that. I have tried all of the tricks to try to get the num - to work but nothing. Any ideas? Also for some more of my system info, this is Ubuntu 8.10 64-bit using the latest version of Wine unpatched.

if you use windowed mode you can see your mouse if you go to ffxiconfig and unset the option for hardware mouse out, so you use software mouse cursor, if you use full screen you need to use hardware mouse in ffxiconfig

i do have the patch or atleast i think i did i clicked on the linked below where you posted the wine 1.1.5 with the patch it didn't work for me so i switched to 1.1.9 maybe this one already had it but i guess not

i heard many people got problems with there keyboard i window mode but i want to say in full screen all the keys works, but the mouse is doing weard then (see my post below) and in window mode its the other way around lol, mouse works and keyboard not, if we find the difference about then we can fix these problems to

It's my experience under Wine 1.1.9 FFXI that in Windowed mode the keyboard works better then fullscreen mode. In fullscreen mode, it seems that when I move my character, when I release the key, it will keep running for a quite some time. Whereas in Windowed mode, he'll stop as soon as I take my finger off the 8 key.

Also, and I'm not sure if this is windowed mode only, but in order for me to get to the main menu (the one you normally get when you push "-") while I'm playing under Wine, I have to push Control-"-" instead of just "-".

Also, going into the config menu (the in game config, not FFXI Config) and turning shadow effects off really helps with the chopiness (this was actually suggested by one of the other testers of FFXI in Wine, click through the different test results to find out who).

i found a problem that i did not find here yet, you now for using the mouse in FFXI, you need to enable hardware cursor in FFXI config in windowed mode that works good, but in full screen mode the cursor from the mouse is always going automatic to above the screen, i cannot cancel it and when i move the mouse cursor down, hes going again, sombody nows how to stop that? oh yeah i dont want to play in windowed screen because mine screen is flikkering like hell, i heard its because of ati cards and im using ati 8.11 drivers so.

i follow all the steps, install all but when i'm downloading FFXI updates the system froze and i have to reset my computer.
PC specifications:
1 GB Ram card
Nvidia 6200 video card
2,99 Pentium 4 procesor

I've been inputing new macros in the game, and what I noticed is when I "cancel" out of a text field, regardless of method it seems, the game slows to a crawl, like 1fps. However by hitting Ctrl L or Ctrl R to chat or re-entering any text field the game speeds right back up instantly. It actually reminds me of the login process when you first sign in to FFXI.

To recreate go in and edit a macro text field, type something in, and exit.

FFXI installed fine on my machine (nVidia 9800, 2.6 Intel Quad, 2 gigs Ram, Ubuntu 8.10). Playonline works with some sound sputters (already noted as a bug) and mirrors itself while loading (once again already noted and this one does not affect it's usability any).

When first starting FFXI I got the black screen after accepting the license agreement, but choosing "Windowed Mode" in the FFXI config fixed that.

-------------

Now; I just told you guys that in case it might help any. My problem with the game is that the - key (for bringing up the main menu) does not seem to work. Everything else on the keyboard works except for -. I have no idea how I can bring up the menu otherwise. Any ideas?

The biggest 3 issues I am running into is there is a 2 inch areas that is distorted on the bottom of the window and it is very lagy all the time. And the last issue is the menu items are so bright you have to guess what they are or look at the decription.

RE: 3 issues I am running into by Peter Andersson on Thursday October 30th 2008, 5:02

Could you post a screen shot of the distortion?

Sounds like it would be related to incorrect dimensions of your rendering surface. Most likely the background surface. Make sure you read and applied all of the steps in the instructions on how to get FFXI working.

Regarding your bright menu items the only thing I can think of is that your graphics card driver is at fault. I believe there are still several global issues with certain ATI cards.

After reading through the guide yet another time I noticed something about adding patch and compiled wine. I missed that part. Is this still needed for wine 1.1.6? I could really use some guidance with that if this is the root of my problems, thanks!

I managed to compile 1.1.6 with the added code, but I still get the same error when I'm running pol and the game. The graphics is flickering and it runs very slow in crowded areas. I got this error after shutting down:

Multiple instances of FFXI by Peter Andersson on Thursday October 23rd 2008, 9:05

Hello everyone.

Today I added a small guide on how to run more than one instance of FFXI at the same time on the same computer.

If you are one of all the people that like to play more than one character at a time I believe you will find this most useful.

Right now there are several draw-backs with the guide and it's methods. They are, at best, crude. I will keep on improving them.

Main problem right now is that it seems there is no way around the fact that you need a separate copy of the new instance. This is because wine seems to put a virtual lock on the files of the first instance.

An optimized way to export the registry data would be to know exactly what data to export and then just process those registry paths. I will see what I can dig up. Maybe someone here knows exactly what needs to be exported.

I should also add that I pruned the Install/Config guide to reflect recent progress.

Also performed some tests on a Intel C2D @3GHz 6GB of RAM and a GeForce 8600 GT GPU on Ubuntu Hardy. Ran two instances of FFXI on a dual head system. The result is very pleasing. I am happy to report that running one or two instances made more or less no difference in performance.

Hmm, I created them as strings I think.. but I'll go back and try DWORDS, might have tried that too though.. I don't remember. I'll try to get the pol viewer off of playonline later on too.. I'm using the old discs that were released at the US launch of the game.

Deb Package with patch! by Jari Vetoniemi on Wednesday September 24th 2008, 9:28

Here i compiled debian package with patch applied. Not sure if it works correctly since i havent yet tested it with FFXI (Im installing it now currently)

But hopefully it will work. Not sure about if the wine menus appears correctly on the application menu atleast i needed to tune the main menu properities a bit so the programs showed up there correctly.

Tho i think its better than nothing and you could always try if you have i368 comp. If you dont like this package you can always remove it with apt-get remove wine ;)

RE: Deb Package with patch! by Pandoraxero on Wednesday September 24th 2008, 21:16

the best you can do until they further develop the DX -> GL wrapper is match the bg to the overlay through the registry. see the howto if you are unfamiliar with this process.

and yes, edges won't look pretty, and it'll be as jaggy as Crisis Core (Which I've been playing recently, among other games) ... but it'll work, and nothing will be blurry. you can try playing with the mipmap setting in the registry, as well. I think its value can go as high as 6, and, while i haven't tested it, it may improve appearance of distant objects.

i tested Anti-aliasing. it seems to have no noticeable effect... that may just be my hardware though.

RE: Deb Package with patch! by Nick on Wednesday September 24th 2008, 22:10

under windows, fsaa and AF make a huge difference to the overall picture. the game is actully pretty in many areas with all this on. as well as transparency aa.
seems that keeping the overlay and bg res the same works the best. I run it with fs settings and it works great but for some reason adjusts the gamma of my whole desktop with the game open. window mode doesnt do this, but doesnt let me change the resolution, or caps the window to 640x480? dragging the window borders doesnt show more space.

RE: Problems with POL by Jeffery on Saturday September 20th 2008, 5:57

After backing off and trying again I got POL to boot. I did it by running winecfg and choosing to emulate a desktop. Then I ran polcfg and unchecked run in windowed mode. Then I opened regedit and edited POL's resolution to match my wine's desktop (it ran but in 100% black otherwise) which was 800x600. POL still resized to 640x480 but works. Unfortunately this wasn't as clean of a solution as my desktop, but one cannot argue with progress.

I've been working somewhat in collaboration with ganiman today. i posted my data on ffxiclopedia forums, and allakhazam. Here's a condensed version:

- POL and FFXI installations should work perfectly.
- Set POL to run in a window and edit the registry so that the window dimensions are 640x480 (C:\\Program\ Files\\PlayOnline\\SquareEnix\\PlayOnlineViewer\\polcfg.exe, HKLM\\Software\\PlayOnline[US|EU]\\SquareEnix\\PlayOnlineViewer\\Settings)
- when launching POL before or after the update, you may need to register a copy of dxdiagn.dll from a windows xp install and set dlloverride to native
- after the ffxi update, it will most likely fail to launch, what you need to do is open the FFXI config utility and set ffxi to windowed mode, then go to the FFXI section of the registry and edit 0001 and 0003 to your desired ffxi window width, and 0002 and 0004 to height. (C:\\Program\ Files\\PlayOnline\\SquareEnix\\FINAL\ FANTASY\ XI\\Tools[US|EU]\\FINAL\ FANTASY\ XI\ Config.exe, HKLM\\Software\\PlayOnline[US|EU]\\SquareEnix\\FinalFantasyXI)
- if there's a problem connecting to lobby server, and the problem's persistent, you need to set your hostname to localhost